Opinions expressed in The ColdType Reader are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher

2 TheReader | November 2009

Men At War

Surprised by disaster

Want to know why the world’s most expensive army can’t
beat a few angry tribesmen? Fred Reed has the answer

W

hy, you might ask, is the
world’s hugest, expensivest,
most begadgeted military
unable to defeat a few thousand angry tribesmen in Afghanistan armed
with AKs and RPGs?
Easy: Character. The men running the
war are mentally the wrong ones to do it.
Think about this for a moment: Suppose
that your boss demanded that, when he
entered the room, you leapt spasmodically
to your feet, stood rigidly erect with your
feet at a forty-five degree angle like a congenitally deformed duck, and stared straight
ahead until he gave you permission to relax. You would think, correctly, that he was
crazy as a bedbug. If he then required staff
to stand in a square so he could inspect their
belt buckles, you would either figure he was
a gay blade or call for a struggle buggy and
some big orderlies. This weird posturing is
not normal, nor are those it appeals to.
Suppose you showed up for freshman
orientation at Princeton and your professors
bellowed at the tops of their voices, three
inches from your face, “Your shoes ain’t
shined good, puke. Get down and give me
fifty.” (Push-ups, that is, which in the military doesn’t mean the better sort of bra.)
You would decide that the loon had lost
whatever mind he had ever had, and call
Domino’s for a cheese pizza, double Haldol.
Should you be so unwary as to suggest

the foregoing in print, the response will usually be that militaries need discipline. True,
and so do newspapers. However, there is a
distinction between discipline and ritualized
lunacy. At every publication for which I have
worked, the editor was clearly and absolutely in charge. Yet I, seldom senior, could say,
“Yeah, Wes, but if we do that, won’t thusand-so bad thing happen?” His decision
was law, but he was happy to hear from
subordinates, who might know something
he didn’t. Editors do not require vaguely sadomasochistic submissiveness.
This hoopla is not of use in combat: The
Taliban seem to be doing rather well without it. Do you suppose their commanders
check their beds to be sure that a quarter
will bounce from their blankets?
Now, what kind of kid wants to go for robot training at West Point or boat school at
Annapolis? Statistically these kids are bright,
gregarious, “motivated” (a favorite military
word), athletic, perhaps Eagle Scouts. Psychologically they want (need?) to live under
a regime of rigid conformity and obedience
that would appear as absurd as it is if we
were not accustomed seeing it among soldiers. That is, they are autoselected not to
think for themselves or question decisions
from above. They are exactly what universities exist not to produce.
The service academies reinforce these
unfortunate characteristics. Their school-

If he then required
staff to stand in a
square so he could
inspect their belt
buckles, you would
either figure he
was a gay blade or
call for a struggle
buggy and some
big orderlies

November 2009 | TheReader 3

Men At War
If the Pentagon
tells him to bomb
a city he has never
heard of and has
no reason to bomb,
killing people who
pose no threat to
him, he will.
He feels no
individual
responsibility
for atrocious
behavior ordered
from above

Fred Reed has
worked on staff for
Army Times, The
Washingtonian,
Soldier of Fortune,
Federal Computer
Week, and The
Washington Times.
His web site is www.
fredoneverything.net

ing consists of four years of learning what
to think, not how to think. There are hours
of running in formation (“If I die on the Russian front….”), close-order drill, manual of
arms . Why? There is no military value in
being able to shift your rifle from shoulder
to shoulder crisply. Like the endless inspections of everything, all of this participation
in the hive inculcates groupishness and a
curious sense of safety in conformity.
The effects are remarkable and, from a
standpoint of civilization, undesirable. Large
authoritarian organizations make easier the
compartmentalization of morality. A colonel typically will be a good neighbor, civicminded, responsible, unlikely to steal your
silverware or kick your dog. If the Pentagon
tells him to bomb a city he has never heard
of and has no reason to bomb, killing people
who pose no threat to him, he will. He feels
no individual responsibility for atrocious behavior ordered from above. “I vas only followink orders,” the Nuremberg defense, is
the bedrock of military ethics, if any.
Men trained in conformist obedience can
work marvels. They just don’t care whether
the marvel is good or evil. If you need to
handle some vast natural disaster, call on
the military. They have the manpower, the
aircraft, the medics, the co-operation to get
things done now. They will stay on their feet
for forty-eight hours without sleep. They
take the “mission” (another favorite military
word) seriously.
What they do not do particularly well is
wage war. Why? Because they have in their
minds a view of war that is partly that of
offensive linemen – you close with the enemy and destroy him – and partly martial
romanticism. They speak of duty, honor,
country, bravery, fallen comrades, proving
oneself. Military history is rife with silly pageantry, nobility of spirit, glorious charges,
and impracticality. Having been trained to
think rigidly, they do.
Before Agincourt, there were things the
French might profitably have learned about
long bows, but didn’t bother because chivalry didn’t concern itself with peasants. It

4 TheReader | November 2009

was the glory of the thing, not whether they
were committing suicide. English generals
killed 20,000 young Brits in one day at the
Somme; they hadn’t compared the ideas in
their heads with then-current military reality (such as that infantry charges over long
distances against massed machine guns,
artillery, and barbed wire are not especially
productive, unless you manufacture embalming fluid.) Authoritarian group-think,
love of ritual, romanticism, inattention: not
a happy brew.
Further, military service encourages an
often-catastrophic sense of masculine potency. Running in formation with fifty other
men (“lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-layeff….”) or
watching a fighter cat-shot from a carrier
deck – the thrill is gonadal, appealing to
something deep in the male psyche, a challenge flung at life. It is wonderful, but not a
sound basis for judgement.
A consequence is a tendency for militaries of the First World to gravely overestimate themselves, and thus underestimate
their enemies. As recent examples, the
French did not expect those slanty-eyed
little zipperheads (les jaunes) to win in Viet
Nam, nor did the Pentagon have any idea
they the US could possibly lose 60,000 dead
and the war in that country, Iraq would be
a cakewalk, and those louse-infested towelheads in Afghanistan had no hope against
American swoosh-kerpows. The US military
in particular has a compulsory can-do attitude, with slogans like “The difficult we can
do today, the impossible takes a bit longer.”
This substitution of morale for comprehension is regularly disastrous.
Having no idea what they are getting into is almost doctrine among professional officers. A major does not become a colonel
by saying, “General, the French didn’t do all
that well at Dien Bien Phu. Maybe we ought
to, you know, do something else. We could
invade Vanuatu.”
America’s problem is not that its generals
prepare for the last war, but that they don’t
prepare for it, and then fight it again the
same way.
CT

Take It Easy

The iron cheer of empire
Here’s why there’ll be no free tortillas in the Workhouse Republic,
writes Joe Bageant from his hideaway in Mexico

E

very afternoon when I knock off
from writing here in Ajijic, Mexico,
after I suck down a Modelo beer
and take an hour nap, I step out
onto the 400-year-old cobbled street, with
its hap-scatter string of vendors lining both
sides. All sorts of vendors – vegetable
vendors, vendors of tacos, chicharrones,
chenille bedspreads and plucked chickens,
cigarros, soft drinks, sopa and suet. Merchants whose business address consists of
a tiny one room aboratto or a card table in
front of their casita.
Tourists seldom venture over to this
working class neighborhood on Calle Zaragoza, and the neighborhood merchants’
customers are their neighbors. Their goods
are the common fare of daily family life
in Mexico. Today, at a table less than two
blocks away, I purchased a dozen brown
eggs, with the idea of making huevos rancheros. The purchase took three quarters
of an hour, and included stumbling but
cheerful half English/half Spanish conversations with the six vendors between my
casita and the table of Gabriel, the old egg
and cheese vendor with an artificial leg and
wizened smile who assures me that rooster
fertilized eggs make a man go all night. “I
am too old to care about that,” I half say,
mostly in that gesturing rudimentary sign
language understood everywhere.
“Hawwww,” he chortles and says some-

thing I cannot understand. An English
speaking bystander, a teenager with a
backward baseball cap and dressed in “L.A.
sag,” translates: “He says his pendejo is as
hard as his plastic leg. You still alive! You
never too old!”
These vendors are not poor people or
peasants. They own homes, drive cars,
watch cable television, send their children
to college and do most of the things North
Americans do. But their jobs are their livelihoods, not their lives, and every transaction
is permeated with the ebb and flow of daily
neighborhood and family life. “Is Maria going to graduate after all? Si! But by just by
the hair in her nose! Who is going to sell fireworks for the Feast of Saint Andrew?” (Saint
Andrew is the patron saint of Ajijic.)

These vendors are
not poor people
or peasants. They
own homes, drive
cars, watch cable
television, send
their children to
college and do
most of the things
North Americans
do

Making a living
Behind the plastered brick walls along the
street mechanics fix cars, dentists pull teeth
and teachers cheer preschoolers on in a
chirping Spanish rendition of Eensy Weensy
Spider. The entire street is busily, but not
hectically, engaged in making a living, with
most of the people doing so within 50 feet
of where they will sleep tonight. But before
they sleep they will sit out on the street,
or perhaps the tiny neighborhood plaza,
gossiping with the same folks who’ve been
their customers all day. The same families
into which their children will marry and
November 2009 | TheReader 5

Take It Easy
It may be my bias,
or my imagination,
or my distaste
for toil, but from
here America
looks like one big
workhouse,
“under God,
indivisible, with
time off to shit,
shower and shop”

whose sick elders they will burn candles
for in the ancient stone church, founded as
a Spanish colonial mission to civilize the
Huichol Indians, who’ve since retreated up
into the mountains to honor their “god of
the opening clouds” in peyote rituals.
Obviously work and commerce have
their problems here, just as anywhere else.
The peso rises and falls. Cheap Chinese
imports crowd out domestic goods. People
work hard, especially tradesmen and laborers, but there is a complete lack of obsession and stress that characterizes North
American jobs. Which, of course, many
Canadians and Americans retired to Ajijic
take for laziness.
It may be my bias, or my imagination, or
my distaste for toil, but from here America
looks like one big workhouse, “under God,
indivisible, with time off to shit, shower
and shop.” A country whose citizens have
been reduced to “human assets” of a vast
and relentless economic machine, moving
human parts oiled by commodities and
kept in motion by the edict, “produce or
die.” Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss
of which spells the loss of everything.
Yeah, yeah, I know, them ain’t jobs –
in America we don’t have jobs, we have
careers. I’ve read the national script, and
am quite aware that all those human assets writing computer code and advertising
copy, or staring at screen monitors in the
“human services” industry are “performing
meaningful and important work in a positive workplace environment.” Performing?
Is this brain surgery? Or a stage act? If we are
performing, then for whom? Exactly who is
watching?
Proof abounds of the unending joy and
importance of work and production in our
wealth-based economy. Just read the job
recruitment ads. Or ask any of the people
clinging fearfully by their fingernails to
those four remaining jobs in America. But
is a job – even the best one – and workplace strivance really everything? Most of
us would say, “Well of course not.” But in

6 TheReader | November 2009

a nation that now sends police to break up
the tent camps and car camps of homeless
unemployed citizens who once belonged to
the middle class, it might very well be everything.
In one of those divine moments of synchronicity writers pray for, I just saw reinforcement of the above. Checking my
email web browser, one of those annoying
ads masquerading as advice, popped up.
It reads: “Doing good work is no longer
enough! Ten tips to keep from being laid off
your job.” Shown is a cheerful young woman at a desk, feeling deliriously safe about
her job, judging from her hysterical bugeyed smile, thanks to “These Ten Tips!”
from a commercial jobs agency. When personal employment fears, job terror and insecurity, can be captured and turned into a
job for someone else, there’s not much room
left for the general spirit of commonality, or
a sense of a shared commons (such as this
Mexican street) of the nation’s work-life.
Not when any of us could become indigent
at a moment’s notice.
No whiners
But you won’t hear anyone complaining.
America doesn’t like whiners. A whiner or a
cynic is about the worst thing you can be in
the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners
often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American
corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping
or sedating its human in accordance with
the media’s projection of the world, and
mediated by the financialization of life’s
every aspect.
Every action and movement is a transaction, some as large as the mortgage, others as small as the purchase of a bus token,
or the cost of a cell phone call, gasoline,
vehicle maintenance and parking costs for
movement within the sprawling asphalt
grids we call communities. Even respite
from work with its vacation “leisure destinations” put on the credit card, and even
the greatest commons of all, nature, has a
cost of access, whether it be admission to

Take It Easy
national parks or the cost of camping and
other “recreational equipment.”
In the background a tabulator relentlessly calculates our bill for the thoroughly
transactional and mediated life. Quit paying
the bills and you are disappeared. Erased
from the screens of a society of watchers
watching each other – or watching celebrities, those godlike creatures dwelling
on the Olympus of the most watched …
and dreaming of perhaps being watched on
Oprah for a few fleeting seconds by even
more watchers than already watch us.
Society of watchers
There is a flickering screen or monitor in
front of and between every citizen of the
mediated society of watchers. Whether
we watch television or other media matters not, we dwell among the watchers in a
surveillance society of our peers. We dress
appropriately, speak middle class English,
not urban street slang or redneck, and look
as prosperous as possible, or as hip as possible, or as learned or pious or whatever
within our peer groups, and for outsider
groups to see. No jokers, smokers or midnight tokers allowed in Mainstream American society and culture, which consists of
working, consuming and “appearing to be,”
but never purely being.
We flow willingly through the transactional circuitry of the wealth economy like
ghosts, optimistic and eerily cheerful, encountering one another through the hierarchical commodity affinity groups we call
our peers, people who consume the same
things we do, and have the same purchased
identity and “lifestyle” we do. Swimmers in
a sea of mass produced goods and mass
produced identities through consumption
of those goods, we strive for uniqueness,

but not very hard, lest we lose the commodities we’ve acquired.
This is stamped deep within our American being by the greater forces of commodity capitalism; we seem to carry it with us
wherever we go. We want to experience
uniqueness. Thus Americans and Canadians complain that there are now “too many
gringos” in Ajijic,” implying that they are
different than the rest of their own kind.
But the truth is that we are all very commonly issued products of a profit driven
workhouse where no human commons is
allowable, lest the workers find meaning
and joy in each other as human beings, and
perhaps become less work driven, less productive and less profitable. Best that their
lives remain mediated, disembodied from
the great commons of the human spirit,
unmoored from the great natural commons
binding all living things called Earth …
images of which will be provided for your
delight on The Nature Channel at 9pm tonight. Until then, stay cheerful. Pay your
bills on time. Good night!
Meanwhile, night is falling in Ajijic. Next
door a child protests his evening bath. A
Chihuahua yips in the casita across the
courtyard, the flickering blue light of a television shatters like harmless lightning on
the face of a very large old woman fallen
asleep in an armchair beneath a hanging
tapestry of Christ feeding his lambs.
Which reminds me. Tomorrow morning I
must make those huevos rancheros. CT

No jokers,
smokers or
midnight tokers
allowed in
Mainstream
American society
and culture,
which consists
of working,
consuming and
“appearing to be,”
but never
purely being

Joe Bageant is the author of the bestselling
Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from
America’s Class War (Random House,
2007). A selection of his writings and
commentary from working class Americans
may be found at www.JoeBageant.com

Read the best of joe bageant
http://www.coldtype.net/joe.html
November 2009 | TheReader 7

The Crazies Within?

Big bad government
is coming to get you

You might not think it possible, but conservatives in America
are becoming nuttier by the day, says David Michael Green

No wonder this
guy doesn’t want
to be told to eat
his vegetables.
One gets the
sense that he
never was. I
think he might
also have been
absent that day
in kindergarten,
when they covered
that whole
sharing concept

L

iars, delusional, petrified, hypocritical, idiotic. I often can’t decide which
of these most accurately describes regressives when I’m listening to their
insane rants. Maybe it’s all of the above, in
some combination or another.
The right in America loves its canned
tropes, but perhaps none so much as the
‘government is evil’ one. Oooooohh! Look
out. Big bad government is coming to get
you. Here’s a recent example, from a regressive fellow living in the South (I know,
I know – what a shocker that is!): “I am
a grown man. I do not need liberals telling
me what to do. If you want to live like slaves
to the government in your big cities and left
wing states, that’s your problem. Keep your
mitts off my liberty …
“Liberalism takes away freedom. Liberalism is inherently controlling over free people. Liberalism seeks to take away freedoms
that have been historically rooted and guaranteed.
“I don’t need you to tell me to eat my
vegetables. I don’t need you to tell me to
buy health insurance. I don’t need you to
tell me to use less water when I shower. I
don’t need you telling me to buy a less gas
guzzling vehicle. I don’t need you telling me
to use mass transit and live in a tiny little
European-style apartment rather than the
big, sprawling house I want. I don’t need
you requiring me to build my house with

8 TheReader | November 2009

green materials.
“You really think modern American and
European liberalism is about freedom?
That’s a joke. It is about you deciding how
everyone must live. It is a hard fist of tyranny cloaked in a velvet glove.”
Wow, eh? The hard fist of tyranny is
haunting big cities!!
First of all, let’s leave aside any observations our good friends in the field of child
psychology might have about the upbringing of someone so devoted to himself that
he adamantly reserves the right to sprawling houses, water-wasting showers, and big,
gas-guzzling cars, regardless of the impact
that might have on the environment we
all must share. No wonder this guy doesn’t
want to be told to eat his vegetables. One
gets the sense that he never was. I think he
might also have been absent that day in kindergarten, when they covered that whole
sharing concept.
And let’s also disregard for the moment
the logic that has liberalism assaulting “freedoms that have been historically rooted and
guaranteed”, when of course it was progressives who did the fighting (and sometimes
dying) to wrench racial and gender equality away from moss-backed reactionary regressives clutching “historically rooted” oppressions in their conservative little hands
(along with their guns, of course). And, I
might add, it was progressives who also did

The Crazies Within?
the same to end slavery and even liberate
the USA from British imperialism all in opposition to lovely “historically rooted” and
even biblically sanctioned traditions.
Finally, let’s also leave aside the “big-city,
left-wing state slavery” which I’m surprised
to be informed that I’ve been living in. What’s
most astonishing is the degree to which the
Stalinist government has hidden my chains.
They don’t even rattle when I drink my
government-approved latte. I hardly notice
them as I run to catch my mandatory subway ride to the communist indoctrination
movie I’m forced to watch each and every
evening. So clever! So insidious!
Hey, and how about those Wall Street
slaves, too, working in Manhattan and living in Connecticut, two ultra-lefty big-city
bastions of liberalism? Don’t you feel bad
for them, enslaved by the government, and
forced to make tens of millions of dollars in
financial transactions so unregulated by the
government that they can crash the entire
global economy? That’s some real oppression, pal. And I know they weep for their
lost freedom each time they climb in their
helicopters for the weekend trip to the
Hamptons, where they are forced by the
government to live on sprawling mansions
and have decadent parties all night long. If
only there was an underground railroad to
whisk them away to the opulence and freedom of the rural South!
But, let’s leave all that aside for the moment, and just think about this notion that
liberalism is the ideology of big oppressive
government, and conservatism is the ideology of freedom from government repression.
I dunno. Seems just a wee bit dubious if you
scratch the surface a little. Ironic, even.
Is the fear of an intrusive big brother the
reason why conservatives want the government to regulate women’s reproductive systems, instead of allowing them to handle it
themselves?
Is that why conservatives want the government to prevent people living in agony
with terminal diseases from choosing to end
their own lives?

Is that concern about big government
why they want it to decide which substances people can imbibe?
Is that why they want the government
to prevent doctors from prescribing medical
marijuana to help retching chemotherapy
patients stay alive?
Is the conservative commitment to freedom from an all-powerful government the
reason why they’ve spent the last decade
gutting the Fourth Amendment protection
against searches and seizures without a
warrant?
Is the commitment to small government
the reason our regressive friends favor laws
controlling who consenting adults are allowed to sleep with?
Or who they’re allowed to marry?
Or if they can use birth control?
Is this what they meant when they demanded that the Republican Congress pass
legislation intervening in Terri Schiavo’s
family medical tragedy? Is this the freedom
from a repressive nanny-state they had in
mind when they applauded George Bush
for flying across the country in the middle of
the night to sign that bill?
It all seems a little confusing to me. I
hear the regressive right talking tough and
thumping their chests, all about the big
bad government which takes away our liberty, and enslaves us. You know, like the
French. Those people who are always out
on the streets protesting their government,
en masse. Because, as slaves, they’ve been
forced to … protest … their … own … government … Er, somethin’ like that …
Yep, somehow, these kooks have decided
that they’re the small government people.
And yet when I think about what the right
favors with respect to anything involving
personal liberties, sexuality, freedom from
repressive government intrusion, even the
decision to end one’s own life – it’s always
just the opposite story. More government
intrusion and regulation, in the very most
personal aspects of our lives. Hmmm. It just
doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Here’s the deal. There are basically two

Is the conservative
commitment to
freedom from
an all-powerful
government the
reason why they’ve
spent the last
decade gutting the
Fourth Amendment
protection against
searches and
seizures without
a warrant?

November 2009 | TheReader 9

The Crazies Within?
I don’t have a
problem with
the nanny state
keeping kids
out of factories,
where they used
to work twelvehour shifts. Yes,
it’s an intrusion
on the freedom
of the magical
marketplace, but
I’m okay with that

David Michael
Green is a professor
of political
science at Hofstra
University in
New York. More
of his work can
be found at his
website, www.
regressiveantidote.
net

categories of government interference in
people’s affairs we can distinguish, the economic and the social.
When it comes to the economic side of
the equation, old-fashioned real conservatives always did favor less government. Less
taxation, less spending, less regulation and
less government ownership of industries.
Today’s regressives, however, are really just
kleptocrats. When Republicans like Ronald
Reagan or George W. Bush come to power,
they spend far more than Democrats (who
aren’t terribly liberal, but leave that aside).
Reagan tripled the national debt in eight
years, and Bush doubled it again, from $5.5
trillion to $11 trillion. The only real difference
these days is that so-called conservatives
use big spending for purposes of funneling
money to cronies like Halliburton or ExxonMobil, while so-called liberals do a bit less of
the same, and maybe throw a bone or two
to the middle class every once in a while.
On the social side, however, the conservative trope about theirs being the ideology of
freedom is a total joke and an ugly lie. These
are the people who want the government in
your underpants, who want the government
reading your mail without a warrant, who
want to control who you sleep with and
who you marry, and who even want to force
you to live in agony when you just want to
crawl off and die. These are the people who
stood in the doorways blocking the movements for racial and sexual equality.
I can’t really think of freedoms more personal and more crucial than these. And every
time I turn around, I see sickening demands
from sickened regressives to take these away
from all of us. (What they then do themselves, privately, of course, is another matter
entirely. Just ask Larry Craig. Or Mark Foley.
Or David Vitter. Or Jimmy Swaggart. Or Ted
Haggard. Or Mark Sanford. Or … ) As if
that isn’t bad enough, then we have to be
lectured on how they’re protecting us from
the big bad nanny state, come to deprive us
of the very freedom they are in fact trying to
get the big bad state to deprive us of.
Call me crazy, but I don’t want my neigh-

10 TheReader | November 2009

bor on the right to have the freedom to build
an abattoir on his land, and my neighbor on
the left to be able to construct a sulfur processing factory.
Call me nutty, but I don’t want parents to
be free to deny their children an education,
or to prevent them from seeing a doctor
when they’re seriously ill. I also don’t think
parents should be able to punish their kids
any way they want, and I’d like the government to make sure children aren’t harmed
and abused. Similarly, I’m just a bit oldfashioned about things like child labor laws.
I don’t have a problem with the nanny state
keeping kids out of factories, where they
used to work twelve-hour shifts. Yes, it’s
an intrusion on the freedom of the magical
marketplace, but I’m okay with that.
Indeed, maybe it’s the knee-jerk Trotskyism in me, but I like the idea of the government making sure that working conditions
are safe for all workers.
I like the government mandating a forty
hour work week.
I like the government monitoring my food
and drugs for safety.
I like the government requiring that the
cars and airplanes I ride in are safe.
I want the government to make sure that
industries don’t pollute the land and air and
water we all share, padding their profits
through environmental destruction.
I know, I know. It’s weird. But somehow
I think that’s a better country than the one
my regressive friends have in mind.
Speaking of whom …
Liars? Delusional? Petrified? Hypocritical? Idiotic?
I guess it is all of the above, after all. Petrified and delusional regressives tell massive lies about supposed freedom that are
riddled with idiotic hypocrisy.
I hope they’ll forgive me for choosing my
big-city, left-wing, European socialist, liberal
slavery, radical vision of the good life over
theirs.
After all, it goes better with my government-restricted, nanny-state regulated, mandatory latte.
CT

Book Excerpt / 1

Cutting through
the static

The following six pages feature the introduction and three essays
from Amy Goodman’s latest book, Breaking The Sound Barrier

1. Introduction

What is typically
presented as news
analysis is, for the
most part, a small
circle of pundits
who know so little
about so much,
explaining the
world to us and
getting it so wrong.
While they may
appear to differ,
they are quibbling
over how quickly
the bombs should
be dropped, not
asking whether
they should be
dropped at all

Beyond the Nine-Minute
Sound barrier

M

y goal as a journalist is to break
the sound barrier, to expand
the debate, to cut through the
static and bring forth voices
that are shut out. It is the responsibility of
journalists to go where the silence is, to seek
out news and people who are ignored, to
accurately and clearly report on the issues
– issues that the corporate, for-profit media
often distort, if they cover them at all.
What is typically presented as news
analysis is, for the most part, a small circle of
pundits who know so little about so much,
explaining the world to us and getting it so
wrong. While they may appear to differ, they
are quibbling over how quickly the bombs
should be dropped, not asking whether they
should be dropped at all.
Unfortunately, as a result, people are increasingly turning away from the news at a
time when news media should be providing
a forum for discussion – a forum that is honest and open, that weighs all the options,
and that includes those deeply affected by
US policy around the globe. I am not talking
about a fringe minority or the silent majority, but a silenced majority, silenced by the
corporate media. The media’s job is to be

Breaking The Sound barrier
Amy Goodman
Haymarket Books, $16

the exception to the rulers, to hold those in
power accountable, to challenge, and to ask
the hard questions – to be the public watchdog.
The media also need to find stories of
hope, to tell stories that resonate with
people’s lives in the real world (not the reel
world). The media are going through profound changes. The Internet undermines
traditional business models that have enriched for-profit media companies. NewsNovember 2009 | TheReader 11

Book Excerpt / 1
These large
corporations,
however, are
trying to control
the Internet, to
restrict the free
flow of information,
to restore their
historical role of
for-profit arbiter
of what we can
and cannot read,
watch, or hear

papers are folding at an alarming rate, like
Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, shuttered
after almost 150 years. Others have stopped
printing paper editions, moving online, like
the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor. In fact, most papers are
still profitable – just not profitable enough
for Wall Street. Shareholders demand a return on investments, attaching no value to
the crucial role that journalism plays in society.
Increasingly restless, people are looking for alternative sources of information in
this complex world. They are getting savvier
at pursuing the news sources they want,
when and how they want it – on websites,
through audio and video podcasting, on mobile platforms. They critique, share, excerpt,
and repost the content they appreciate,
adding their insights, running circles around
the old networks while building their own
trusted online communities. Many contribute reporting, joining the global ranks of
the increasingly important citizen (and noncitizen) journalists. All this was enabled because the Internet has been free and unfettered, driven by “net neutrality,” the rules of
the Internet that have kept its content and
uses equal – that have made web sources
like democracynow.org as readily available
as the sites of the major media corporations.
These large corporations, however, are trying to control the Internet, to restrict the free
flow of information, to restore their historical role of for-profit arbiter of what we can
and cannot read, watch, or hear. Preserving
net neutrality will prevent their digital oligopoly, keeping the Internet a level playing
field.
Despite the opportunities this new media environment provides, there is still no
replacing the historically crucial role played
by the seasoned muckraker in our society.
How can journalism be supported sustainably? There has been much discussion of
“nonprofit” journalism. I! has been practicing nonprofit journalism for 14 years, following the lead of Pacifica Radio, which has
been at it for more than 60 years, brought to

12 TheReader | November 2009

you by the audience – not by corporations
that profit from war.
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program,
pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the United States. We broadcast on
Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio
stations; on public access, PBS, and satellite
television; and on the Internet at democracynow.org. Democracy Now!’s podcast is one
of the most popular on the web. We shepherd our resources carefully, invest in people, develop and use open source technology, and don’t answer to advertisers.
I remember as the bombs were falling on
Baghdad in 2003, when we got an e-mail
from Radio Skid Row, a Sydney, Australia,
community radio station that carries Democracy Now! They received a comment
from a listener asking, “How is it that the
best coverage of the war is coming from the
poorest station in Sydney?” This is what independent media is all about: unembedded,
investigative, international journalism.
The columns collected here are stories
from both the streets and the suites, bringing out voices from all over this increasingly
globalized world. Unprecedented changes
are affecting everyone, everywhere. I have
tried to go beyond the nine-second sound
bite to bring you a taste of the whole meal.
I see the media as a huge kitchen table that
stretches across this globe, one we all sit
around to debate and discuss the most critical issues of the day: war and peace, life and
death. Anything less than that is a disservice
to a democratic society.

2. NOVEMBER 30, 2006

The Art of War
and Deception

E

“

very great work of art goes through
messy phases while it is in transition. A lump of clay can become a
sculpture; blobs of paint become
paintings which inspire.”

Book Excerpt / 1
No, this is not Pablo Picasso speaking,
but Major General William B. Caldwell IV,
spokesman for the Multinational Force–
Iraq, comparing the carnage in Iraq to a
work of art in another audacious attempt to
paint Iraq as anything other than a catastrophe.
The general’s remarks do bring the great
artist to mind. Picasso’s epic painting Guernica, named after the city in Spain, captured
the brutality of the bombing of that city during another civil war, the Spanish Civil War.
The painting, almost 30 feet wide, is a
globally recognized depiction and artistic
condemnation of war. Picasso shows the
terror on the faces of people, the frightened
animals. He shows the dead, the dying, the
dismembered. A tapestry reproduction of it
adorns the lobby outside of the United Nations Security Council.
In February 2003, before then–US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his major push for war at the United Nations – a
speech he would later call a “blot” on his record – a blue curtain was drawn across the
tapestry so that the image would not be the
backdrop for press statements on the coming
war. Immediately, posters and banners of Picasso’s Guernica began appearing at the antiwar demonstrations sweeping the globe.
The attempted control of imagery and
propaganda, language and spin has been
a high priority of the Bush administration.
Yes, the Pentagon forbade photographing
the flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers. But
the manipulation goes beyond the war.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower once
said, “Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed.” If Eisenhower worked for
the government today, he would have to
revise his statement. Recently, the Bush administration stopped using the words “hunger” or “hungry” when describing the millions of Americans who can’t afford to eat.
Instead of suffering from hunger, the Agriculture Department now says these people
are experiencing “very low food security.”

While the Bush administration has had
some success in covering up the truth, it
seems like reality is finally beginning to outpace its efforts.
Take, for example, Hurricane Katrina.
A side effect of the Bush administration
not responding to that disaster in a timely
fashion is that when the network reporters
went to New Orleans, there were no troops
to embed with. What we saw for one of the
first times was the network correspondents
reporting from the victims’ perspective. Day
after day, unspun, unfiltered.
Bodies floated across our TV screens. I
remember a young woman reporter interviewing a man whose wife’s hand had just
slipped out of his, as she told him to take
care of their children. After telling his story, the man waded into the water in shock
with his boy. The reporter started to cry.
The reports galvanized the country. Could
you imagine if for one week we saw those
images in Iraq: babies dead on the ground,
women with their legs blown off by cluster
bombs, soldiers dead and dying. Americans
are a compassionate people. They would
say no – war is not an answer to conflict in
the twenty-first century.
The debate now in vogue is whether Iraq
is in a civil war. Sectarian violence on a mass
scale is acknowledged all around: Gone are
the harangues that the media are not covering the “positive stories” or the “good
news” – there simply is no good news in
Iraq. The Iraqi Ministry of Health estimated
that 150,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion. An October medical journal article estimated the civilian death toll as somewhere
near 655,000.
The US invasion and occupation of Iraq
has now lasted longer than the US involvement in World War II. Iraqis suffered the
most violent day in the entire war while
Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving. Iraq, like Spain in the 1930s, is in a civil
war. A civil war started by the US invasion and fueled by the US occupation. The
shroud over the UN’s Guernica tapestry is
gone. Now the only shrouds worth noting

Bodies floated
across our
TV screens. I
remember a young
woman reporter
interviewing a man
whose wife’s hand
had just slipped out
of his, as she told
him to take care
of their children.
After telling his
story, the man
waded into the
water in shock
|with his boy.
The reporter
started to cry

November 2009 | TheReader 13

Book Excerpt / 1
“I was in terrible
pain, and I started
to scream. When
they started taking
pictures, I could
see that they were
people who were
masked. They were
dressed in black
from head to toe,
and they were also
wearing surgical
gloves”

are those that wrap the victims of the daily
slaughter in Iraq.
3. DECEMBER 18, 2007

Surviving a
CIA ‘Black Site’

T

he kidnap and torture program of
the Bush administration, with its
secret CIA “black site” prisons and
“torture taxi” flights on private jets,
saw a little light of day this week. I spoke to
Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in his
first broadcast interview. Bashmilah was a
victim of the CIA’s so-called extraordinary
rendition program, in which people are
grabbed from their homes, out of airports,
off the streets, and are whisked away, far
from the prying eyes of the US Congress,
the press, far from the reach of the courts,
to countries where cruelty and torture are
routine.
Bashmilah is being represented by the
American Civil Liberties Union and by the
New York University School of Law International Human Rights Clinic in a lawsuit
with four other victims of CIA rendition.
They are suing not the US government,
not the CIA, but a company called Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing
Corp. A former Jeppesen employee, Sean
Belcher, entered an affidavit in support of
Bashmilah, reporting that Jeppesen executive Bob Overby bragged, “We do all of the
extraordinary rendition flights,” further
explaining to staff that he was speaking
of “the torture flights,” and that they paid
very well.
Through a translator, over the phone
from his home in Yemen, Bashmilah described how his ordeal began on October
21, 2003, when he was arrested in Amman,
Jordan:
“It was approximately six days, but what
I endured there is worth years. They wanted
me to confess to having some connections
to some individuals of al-Qaeda. They tried

14 TheReader | November 2009

several times to get me to confess, and every
time I said no, I would get either a kick, a
slap, or a curse. Then they said that if I did
not confess, they will bring my wife and rape
her in front of me. And out of fear for what
would happen to my family, I screamed and
I fainted. After I came to, I told them that
‘please, don’t do anything to my family. I
would cooperate with you in any way you
want.’”
After signing a false confession, he was
told he was going to be released. In the process of being led through the Jordanian intelligence facility, he lifted his blindfold.
“I saw another man who had a Western
look. He was white and somewhat overweight and had dark glasses on. I realized
then that they were probably handing me
over to some other agency, because during
the interrogations I had with the Jordanians, one of the threats was that if I did not
confess, they will hand me over to American
intelligence.”
He was prepared for transit
“…stripped completely naked. They
started taking pictures from all directions.
And they also started to beat me on my sides
and also my feet. And then they put me in
a position similar to the position of prostration in Muslim prayer, which is similar to the
fetal position. And in that position, one of
them inserted his finger in my anus very violently. I was in terrible pain, and I started to
scream. When they started taking pictures,
I could see that they were people who were
masked. They were dressed in black from
head to toe, and they were also wearing
surgical gloves.”
He says he was put in a diaper, had his
eyes and ears covered, a bag was put over
his head, and he had additional earphones
put on his head to block noise. He was then
flown to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was
held in solitary confinement for close to six
months. He believed he was being held by
Americans.
“Some of the interrogators would come to
me and interrogate me in the interrogation
room, and they would tell me, “You should

Book Excerpt / 1
calm down and be comforted, because we’ll
send all this information to Washington.”
And they would say that in Washington,
they will determine whether my answers
are truthful or not.”
Although kept isolated from other prisoners, he managed to overhear some of them
speculating that they were being held at Bagram Air Base. He went on to say that he
was kept awake with blaring music and was
held in shackles that were removed only for
periodic interrogations.
While Bashmilah was being interrogated
and tortured, he was also visited by “psychiatrists.” “[T]he therapy mainly consisted of
trying to look at my thoughts and trying to
interpret them for me, in addition to some
tranquilizers.”
Bashmilah attempted suicide three times,
staged a hunger strike that was painfully
ended with a feeding tube forced down his
nose, and was denied access to a lawyer, to
any human rights group, to the International Committee of the Red Cross. In effect, he
was disappeared.
On May 5, 2005, he was transferred to a
prison in Yemen, where he eventually gained
access to his family. Amnesty International
got involved. He was released in March 2006
with no charges relating to terrorism.
Mohamed Bashmilah said there were
cameras in his cells and interrogation rooms.
Perhaps tapes were made of his ordeal. Let’s
hope that the CIA doesn’t destroy these,
too.

4. March 24, 2009

Lessons of the
Exxon Valdez

T

wenty years ago, the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled at least
11 million gallons of oil into
Alaska’s pristine Prince William
Sound. The consequences of the spill
were epic and continue to this day, impacting the environment and the econo-

my. Instead of seeing it as just a pollution
story, Riki Ott considers the Exxon Valdez
disaster to be a fundamental threat to US
democracy.
Ott, a marine toxicologist and commercial salmon “fisherma’am” from Cordova,
Alaska, opens her book on the disaster, Not
One Drop, with the words of Albert Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the
same consciousness that created it.”
The massive spill stretched 1,200 miles
from the accident site, and covered 3,200
miles of shoreline and an incredible 10,000
square miles overall.
Early on March 24, 1989, Ott, who was on
the board of the Cordova District Fishermen
United, was airborne, surveying the scene:
“[I]t was a surreal scene. It was just dropdead gorgeous, March, sunrise, pink mountains glistening with the sunrise. And all of a
sudden we come on the scene, where there’s
this red deck of this oil tanker that’s three
football fields long; flat, calm water, dark
blue; and there’s this inky-black stain that’s
just stretching with the tide.”
News of the spill went global, and people poured into Valdez, Alaska, to start the
cleanup. Sea life was devastated. Ott says
up to half a million sea birds died, along
with 5,000 sea otters, 300 or so harp seals,
and billions of young salmon, fish eggs, and
young juvenile fish. The death of the fish
eggs created a long-term but delayed impact on the herring and salmon fisheries in
Prince William Sound. By 1993, the fisheries
had collapsed.
Families lost their livelihoods after taking huge loans to buy boats and expensive
fishing permits. While the salmon fishery
has improved, the herring have never come
back.
This economic disruption is one basis
of legal action against Exxon-Mobil, the
biggest oil corporation in the world. Complex litigation has dragged on for two decades, and ExxonMobil is winning. There
are 22,000 plaintiffs suing ExxonMobil.
A jury awarded the plaintiffs $5 billion in
damages, equal to what was, at the time,

Bashmilah
attempted suicide
three times,
staged a hunger
strike that was
painfully ended
with a feeding
tube forced down
his nose, and was
denied access
to a lawyer, to
any human rights
group, to the
International
Committee of
the Red Cross.
In effect, he was
disappeared

November 2009 | TheReader 15

Book Excerpt / 1
The power of
ExxonMobil
to battle tens
of thousands
of citizens has
pushed Ott to
join a growing
number of activists
who want to put
corporations back
in their place by
stripping them of
their legal status
as “persons”

a year’s worth of Exxon profits. This was
cut in half by a US appeals court, then finally lowered to just over $500 million by
the Supreme Court. During the 20 years of
court battles, 6,000 of the original plaintiffs
have died. ExxonMobil, with its billions in
annual profits and armies of lawyers, can
tie up the Valdez case in the courts for decades, while the injured commercial fishers
slowly die off.
The power of ExxonMobil to battle tens
of thousands of citizens has pushed Ott
to join a growing number of activists who
want to put corporations back in their place
by stripping them of their legal status as
“persons.”
A 19th-century US Supreme Court decision gave corporations the same status as
people, with access to the protections of the
Bill of Rights. Ironically, this comes from the
Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection
clause,” adopted to protect freed slaves from
oppressive state laws after the Civil War.
Corporations were historically chartered by
states to conduct their business. States could
revoke a corporation’s charter if it broke the
law or acted beyond its charter.
Corporations’ “free speech” is interpreted
to include making campaign contributions
and lobbying Congress. People who break
laws can be locked up; when a corporation
breaks the law – even behaving criminally

negligently, causing death – rarely are the
consequences greater than a fine, which
the corporation can write off on its taxes.
As Ott put it, “If ‘three strikes and you’re
out’ laws can put a person in prison for life,
why not a corporation?” So-called tort reform in US law is eroding an individual’s
ability to sue corporations and the ability
for courts to assess damages that would
actually deter corporate wrongdoing.
Ott and others have drafted a “TwentyEighth Amendment” to the Constitution
that would strip corporations of their personhood, subjecting them to the same oversight that existed for the first 100 years of
US history.
With the global economic meltdown and
welling public outrage over the excesses
of executives at AIG as well as over other
bailout beneficiaries, now just might be the
time to expand public engagement over the
imbalance of power between people and
corporations that has undermined our democracy.
CT
Amy Goodman is the host of the
radio/TV program Democracy Now! www.democracynow.org
Her previous books, co-authored with
David Goodman, are The Exception To
The Rulers, Standing Up To The Madness,
and Static

Amy Goodman breaks through the corporate media’s lies, sound-bites,
and silence in this wide-ranging new collection of articles.

Amy Goodman
“Amy Goodman has taken investigative journalism to new heights of exciting,
informative, and probing analysis.” —Noam Chomsky

New from Haymarket Books. Available in good bookstores everywhere.
16 TheReader | November 2009

Book Excerpt / 2

Taking flight:
memories of diaspora

Ramzy Baroud’s family expected they’d soon return home after
being expelled by Zionist militias in 1948. They’re still waiting

They headed
south. That was all
they knew. First
to Isdud, then to
Hamameh, then to
Gaza. Everywhere
they settled, they
were chased
with mortars and
airplanes and
bombs

The following is an excerpt from Ramzy
Baroud’s book, My Father Was a Freedom
Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story. The events
take place in Baroud’s historic home of Beit
Daras, one of the nearly 500 Palestinian
villages that were destroyed by Zionist
militias in 1948. Baroud’s father, a very
young boy, and his family are fleeing on foot
to their new destiny in a refugee camp in the
Gaza Strip, where they remain to this day

S

pring was one of the most beautiful
times of the year in the countryside
of Palestine. With everything in full
bloom – apricots, almonds, oranges
and lemons – the perfume carried itself on
the wind for miles. As the villagers embarked on this rite of passage, many captured a long moment to breathe in the fragrance of the fields and orchards, to snatch
a large handful of the earth of Beit Daras,
wrap it in a small piece of cloth and tuck it
away for safe keeping. Deeds and keys were
stored safely.
Grandpa Mohammed mounted his
faithful donkey with a few of the family’s
belongings and young daughter Mariam.
Ibrahim was in his mother’s arms. Ahmed
walked alongside his father, and my father,
Mohammed, barefoot and confused, trotted behind. It was another trail of tears of
sorts.
Neither parent had answers to the chil-

my father was a freedom fighter
Ramzy Baroud
Pluto Press, $18

dren’s incessant questions, “Where are we
going?”
They headed south. That was all they
knew. First to Isdud, then to Hamameh,
then to Gaza. Everywhere they settled,
they were chased with mortars and airplanes and bombs. As the bombardments
progressed and more villages were razed,
the roads became more and more populated, some people carrying on with a great
sense of urgency, others wandering aimlessly and in a daze.
November 2009 | TheReader 17

Book Excerpt / 2
In a mix of rage
and relief, Zeinab
swept Mohammed
up into her arms,
chastising him
while smothering
him with kisses.
For the rest of the
journey, Zeinab
would never let
anyone fall behind

Grandpa Mohammed was a man of faith.
He insisted that if the Arabs were to abandon the Palestinians, God would not. Muddied, with bloody feet and empty bellies,
the children could hardly argue with their
father’s wisdom, even as they passed an occasional body in the middle of the road, or
a frantic mother running in the opposite direction weeping for her lost children.
“God will take care of us,” Grandpa Mohammed encouraged. Yet, there was no one
in sight but fleeing refugees, blown up bodies, starved children, and crying women.
“What kept Beit Daras standing for a thousand years can always bring it back,” he insisted. But the many trucks and numerous
donkeys walking the dirt road, loaded with
whatever families managed to salvage told
of another story.
The number of refugees was growing by
the hour. In Beit Daras everyone knew everyone. But not anymore. The number of
familiar faces was dwindling. Many died.
Many fled elsewhere, and those heading to
Gaza were now joined by so many new faces, equally pale and teary, from numerous
villages that extended beyond the world of
Beit Daras.
Mohammed, the son, was hungry and
he was tired. The sun was oppressive and
beat down on the back of his neck; trotting behind his mother he stopped under
the shade of a tree for just a few moments.
It didn’t take long for the boy to regain his
strength and he ran ahead to catch up with
his family. Meanwhile, Zeinab couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him,
and discovered that Mohammed was no
longer behind her. She became hysterical,
calling his name and running directionless;
a deep seeded pain in her belly warned her
of losing her boy forever. She asked everyone whopassed, “Peace be upon you, have
you seen my boy, Mohammed?”, or “For
God’s sake, have you seen my son? He is ten
years old and he went missing this morning…” But she was one of so many that
had become separated from their children.
Mothers and fathers would express their

18 TheReader | November 2009

commiseration, others would say nothing,
but for a short moment they would share a
knowing gaze, and then sadly move on. After an eternity had passed that afternoon,
Zeinab spotted her son, gently tugging on
the sleeve of another mother, repeating the
same supplications as Zeinab, “Peace be
upon you, have you seen my mother?” In
a mix of rage and relief, Zeinab swept Mohammed up into her arms, chastising him
while smothering him with kisses. For the
rest of the journey, Zeinab would never let
anyone fall behind.
Grandpa Mohammed, though he managed to carve a safe route for his family’s
future, lost every sense of direction, every
element of sanity and control. In a matter
of days, he was left with nothing but a donkey and a few old blankets. The family had
decided to leave the new blankets at home
in Beit Daras, for they would be returning
soon and didn’t want the new blankets to
be dirtied and damaged while they were
away. Did Grandpa Mohammed know that
Beit Daras was no longer the beloved village
he left behind? The houses were blown up,
the fields burned. The great mosque was
razed with dynamite. The diwans where
the mukhtars met to drink coffee with the
elders of the village were gone. The elementary school. Al-Massriyyen neighborhood.
The small mud-brick home with the dove
tower. The citrus orchard that perfumed
the village every spring. All had gone.
Still standing, however, were two giant pillars demarcating where the old mosque once
stood. Grandpa Mohammed spent much
of his youth, resting against the mosques’
white-washed walls, seeking God’s mercy
and blessing. “Allah always comes to the side
of the oppressed,” he told his family. Mohammed the son was worried about his school
and his one textbook, the shattered hopes
of an exciting summer, the friends whom he
would never see again.
CT
Ramzy Baroud’s is also author of The
Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle
of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London)

Getting Goldstone

The attack on
humanitarian law

Did members of the US House of Representatives read the
Goldstone report on the fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict
before they rejected it? It seems unlikely, says Stephen Zunes

I

n a stunning blow against international
law and human rights, the US House
of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution on November 3 attacking the report of the Upoliticians read
the Goldstone report befnited Nations Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission
on the Gaza conflict. The report was authored by the well-respected South African
jurist Richard Goldstone and three other
noted authorities on international humanitarian law, who had been widely praised for
taking leadership in previous investigations
of war crimes in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Since this
report documented apparent war crimes
by a key US ally, however, Congress has
taken the unprecedented action of passing
a resolution condemning it. Perhaps most
ominously, the resolution also endorses Israel’s right to attack Syria and Iran on the
grounds that they are “state sponsors of
terrorism.”
The principal co-sponsors of the resolution (HR 867), which passed on a 344-36
vote, included two powerful Democrats:
House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and Middle
East subcommittee chairman Gary Ackerman (D-NY). Democratic majority leader
Steny Hoyer (D-MD) successfully pushed
Democrats to support the resolution by a
more than 6:1 margin, despite the risk of

alienating the party’s liberal pro-human
rights base less than a year before critical
midterm elections.
The resolution opens with a series of
clauses criticizing the original mandate
of the UN Human Rights Council, which
called for an investigation of possible Israeli war crimes only. This argument is completely moot, however, since Goldstone and
his colleagues – to their credit – refused to
accept the offer to serve on the mission unless its mandate was changed to one that
would investigate possible war crimes by
both sides in the conflict.
As a result, the mandate of the mission
was thereby broadened. The House resolution doesn’t mention this, however, and
instead implies that the original mandate
remained the basis of the report. In reality, even though the report contained over
70 pages detailing a series of violations of
the laws of war by Hamas, including rocket
attacks into civilian-populated areas of Israel, torture of Palestinian opponents, and
the continued holding of kidnapped Israeli
soldier Gilad Shalit, there’s no acknowledgement in the 1,600-word resolution
that the initial mandate had been superseded or that the report criticizes the conduct of both sides. In fact, despite the report’s extensive documentation of Hamas
assaults on Israeli towns – which it determined constituted war crimes and possible

The resolution
opens with clauses
criticizing the
original mandate
of the UN Human
Rights Council,
which called for
an investigation
of possible Israeli
war crimes only.
This argument is
moot, however,
since Goldstone
and his colleagues
refused to accept
the offer to serve
on the mission
unless its mandate
was changed

November 2009 | TheReader 19

Getting Goldstone
ving 80% of the
US House of
Representatives
go on record
attacking the
integrity of one
of the world’s
most respected
and principled
defenders of
human rights
is indicative of
just how far to
the right the US
Congress has now
become, even
under Democratic
leadership

“crimes against humanity” – the resolution
insists that it “makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks.”
The Goldstone mission report – totaling 575 pages – contains detailed accounts
of deadly Israeli attacks against schools,
mosques, private homes, and businesses
nowhere near legitimate military targets,
which they accurately described as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed
to punish humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” In particular, the report
cites 11 incidents in which Israeli armed
forces engaged in direct attacks against civilians, including cases where people were
shot “while they were trying to leave their
homes to walk to a safer place, waving
white flags.” The House resolution, however, claims that such charges of deliberate
Israeli attacks against civilian areas were
“sweeping and unsubstantiated.”
Both the report’s conclusions and most
of the particular incidents cited were independently documented in detailed empirical investigations released in recent months
by Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch, and the Israeli human rights group
B’Tselem, among others. Congressional attacks against the integrity of the Goldstone
report, therefore, constitute attacks against
the integrity of these reputable human
rights groups as well.
Equating killing Civilians
with self-defense
In an apparent effort to further discredit
the human rights community, the resolution goes on to claim that the report denies
Israel’s right to self defense, even though
there was absolutely nothing in the report
that questioned Israel’s right to use military
force. It simply insists that neither Israelis
nor Palestinians have the right to attack civilians.
The resolution resolves that the report
is “irredeemably biased” against Israel, an
ironic charge given that Justice Goldstone,
the report’s principal author and defender,
is Jewish, a longtime supporter of Israel,

20 TheReader | November 2009

chair of Friends of Hebrew University, president emeritus of the World ORT Jewish
school system, and the father of an Israeli
citizen.
Goldstone was also a leading opponent
of apartheid in his native South Africa and
served as Nelson Mandela’s first appointee
to the country’s post-apartheid Supreme
Court. He was a principal prosecutor in the
war crimes tribunals on Rwanda and the
former Yugoslavia, took a leading role in
investigations into corruption in the UN’s
“Oil for Food” program in Iraq, and was
also part of investigations into Argentina’s
complicity in provided sanctuary for Nazi
war criminals.
Having 80% of the US House of Representatives go on record attacking the integrity of one of the world’s most respected
and principled defenders of human rights
is indicative of just how far to the right
the US Congress has now become, even
under Democratic leadership. In doing so,
Congress has served notice to the human
rights community that they won’t consider
any human rights defenders credible if they
dare raise questions about the conduct of a
US ally. This may actually be the underlying
purpose of the resolution: to jettison any
consideration of international humanitarian law from policy debates in Washington.
The cost, however, will likely be to further
isolate the United States from the rest of
the world, just as Obama was beginning to
rebuild the trust of other nations.
Indeed, the resolution calls on the
Obama administration not only “to oppose
unequivocally any endorsement” of the
report, but to even oppose unequivocally
any “further consideration” of the report
in international fora. Instead of debating
its merits, therefore, Congress has decided
to instead pre-judge its contents and disregard the actual evidence put forward. (It’s
doubtful that any of the supporters of the
resolution even bothered actually reading
the report.) The resolution even goes so
far as to claim that Goldstone’s report is
part of an effort “to delegitimize the demo-

Getting Goldstone
cratic State of Israel and deny it the right
to defend its citizens and its existence can
be used to delegitimize other democracies and deny them the same right.” This
is demagoguery at its most extreme. In insisting that documenting a given country’s
war crimes is tantamount to denying that
country’s right to exist and its right to self
defense, the resolution is clearly aimed at
silencing defenders of international humanitarian law. The fact that the majority
of Democrats voted in favor of this resolution underscores that both parties now
effectively embrace the neoconservative
agenda to delegitimize any serious discussion of international humanitarian law, in
relation to conduct by the United States
and its allies.
License for War?
Having failed in their efforts to convince
Washington to launch a war against Syria and Iran, neoconservatives and other
hawks in Washington have now successfully mobilized a large bipartisan majority
of the House of Representatives to encourage Israel to act as a US surrogate: Following earlier clauses that define Israel’s
massive military assault on the civilian
infrastructure of the Gaza Strip as a legitimate defense of its citizens and make the
exaggerated assertion that Iran and Syria
are “sponsors” of Hamas, the final clause
in the resolution puts Congress on record
supporting “Israel’s right to defend its citizens from violent militant groups and their
state sponsors” (emphasis added). This
broad bipartisan congressional mandate
for a unilateral Israeli attack on Syria and
Iran is extremely dangerous, and appears
designed to undercut the Obama administration’s efforts to pursue a negotiated path
to settling differences with these countries.
There are other clauses in the resolution
that take quotes out of context and engage
in other misrepresentations to make the
case that Goldstone and his colleagues are
“irredeemably biased.”
One clause in the resolution attacks the

credibility of mission member Christine
Chinkin, an internationally respected British scholar of international law, feminist jurisprudence, alternative dispute resolution,
and human rights. The resolution questions
her objectivity by claiming that “before
joining the mission, [she] had already declared Israel guilty of committing atrocities
in Operation Cast Lead by signing a public
letter on January 11, 2009, published in the
Sunday Times, that called Israel’s actions
‘war crimes.’” In reality, the letter didn’t accuse Israel of “atrocities,” but simply noted
that Israel’s attacks against the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip were “not
commensurate to the deaths caused by
Hamas rocket fire.” The letter also noted
that “the blockade of humanitarian relief,
the destruction of civilian infrastructure,
and preventing access to basic necessities
such as food and fuel, are prima facie war
crimes.” In short, it was a preliminary assessment rather than a case of having “already declared Israel guilty,” as the resolution states.
Furthermore, at the time of the letter –
written a full two weeks into the fighting
– there had already been a series of preliminary reports from Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, and the International
Committee of the Red Cross documenting
probable war crimes by Israeli armed forces,
so virtually no one knowledgeable of international humanitarian law could have
come to any other conclusion. As a result,
Chinkin’s signing of the letter could hardly
be considered the kind of ideologically motivated bias that should preclude her participation on an investigative body, particularly
since that same letter unequivocally condemned Hamas rocket attacks as well.
The resolution also faults the report for
having “repeatedly downplayed or cast
doubt upon” claims that Hamas used “human shields” as an attempted deterrence
to Israeli attacks. The reason the report
challenged those assertions, however, was
that there simply wasn’t any solid evidence
to support such claims. Detailed investiga-

There are other
clauses in the
resolution that
take quotes out
of context and
engage in other
misrepresentations
to make the case
that Goldstone
and his colleagues
are “irredeemably
biased”

November 2009 | TheReader 21

Getting Goldstone
The resolution
also fails to
mention that while
Hamas officials
were willing to
meet with the
mission, Israeli
officials refused,
even denying them
entrance into
Israel. The mission
had to fly Israeli
victims of Hamas
attacks to Geneva
at UN expense to
interview them

tions by Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch regarding such accusations
during and subsequent to the fighting also
came to same conclusion. As with these
previous investigations, the Goldstone
report determined that there were occasions when Hamas hadn’t taken all necessary precautions to avoid placing civilians
in harm’s way, but they found no evidence
whatsoever that Hamas had consciously
used civilians as shields at any point during
the three-week conflict.
Despite this, the House resolution
makes reference to a supposed “great body
of evidence” that Hamas used human
shields. The resolution fails to provide a
single example to support this claim, however, other than a statement by one Hamas
official, which the mission investigated and
eventually concluded was without merit. I
contacted the Washington offices of more
than two dozen co-sponsors of the resolution, requesting such evidence, and none of
them were able to provide any. It appears,
then, that the sponsors of the resolution
simply fabricated this charge in order to
protect Israel from any moral or legal responsibilities for the more than 700 civilian
deaths. (Interestingly, the report did find
extensive evidence – as did Amnesty International – that the Israelis used Palestinians as human shields during their offensive. Israeli soldiers testifying at hearings
held by a private group of Israeli soldiers
and veterans confirmed a number of such
episodes as well. This fact was conveniently left out of the resolution.)
In another example of misleading content, the resolution quotes Goldstone as
saying, in relation to the mission’s investigation, “If this was a court of law, there
would have been nothing proven.” However, no such investigation carried out on
behalf of the UNHRC has ever claimed to

have obtained evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, the normal criterion for proof
in a court of law. This does not, however,
buttress the resolution’s insistence that the
report was therefore “unworthy of further
consideration or legitimacy.” What the
fact-finding mission did find was probable cause for criminal investigations into
possible war crimes by both Hamas and
the Israeli government. Another spurious
claim of bias is the resolution’s assertion
that “the report usually considered public statements made by Israeli officials not
to be credible, while frequently giving uncritical credence to statements taken from
what it called the `Gaza authorities’, i.e.
the Gaza leadership of Hamas.” In reality, the report shows that the mission did
investigate such statements and evaluated
them based upon the evidence. The resolution also fails to mention that while Hamas
officials were willing to meet with the mission, Israeli officials refused, even denying
them entrance into Israel. The mission had
to fly Israeli victims of Hamas attacks to
Geneva at UN expense to interview them.
The mission found these Israelis’ testimony
credible, took them quite seriously, and incorporated them into their findings.
The resolution goes on to claim that the
report’s observation that the Israeli government has “contributed significantly to a
political climate in which dissent with the
government and its actions . . . is not tolerated” was erroneous. In reality, it has been
well-documented – and has been subjected
to extensive debate within Israel – that the
right-wing government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has interrogated and harassed political activists as well as suppressed
criticism and sources of potential criticism
of actions by the Israeli military, particularly
non-government organizations such as the
dissident soldiers’ group Breaking the Silence.

Getting Goldstone
No accountability
The House resolution is particularly vehement in its opposition to the report’s recommendation that, should Hamas and
Israeli authorities fail to engage in credible
investigations and bring those responsible
for war crimes to justice, the matter should
be referred to the International Criminal
Court for possible prosecution. The resolution insists this is unnecessary since Israel
“has already launched numerous investigations.” However, Israeli human rights
groups have repeatedly criticized their government’s refusal to launch any independent investigations and have documented
how the Israeli government has refused to
investigate testimonies by soldiers of war
crimes. (At this point, the only indictments
for misconduct by Israeli forces during the
conflict have been against two soldiers
who stole credit cards from a Palestinian
home.)
The primary motivation for the resolution appears to have been to block any
consideration of its recommendation that
those guilty of war crimes be held accountable. Since the ICC has never indicted anyone from a country which had a fair and
comprehensive internal investigation of

war crimes and prosecuted those believed
responsible, the goal of Congress appears
to be that of protecting war criminals from
prosecution.
As a result, the passage of this resolution isn’t simply about the alleged clout of
AIPAC or just another example of longstanding congressional support for Israeli
militarism.
This resolution constitutes nothing less
than a formal bipartisan rejection of international humanitarian law. US support for
human rights and international law has always been uneven, but never has Congress
gone on record by such an overwhelming margin to discredit these universal
principles so categorically. This is George
W. Bush’s foreign policy legacy, which –
through this resolution – the Democrats,
no less than their Republican counterparts,
have now eagerly embraced.
CT

Since the ICC
has never indicted
anyone from a
country which
had a fair and
comprehensive
internal
investigation
of war crimes
and prosecuted
those believed
responsible, the
goal of Congress
appears to be that
of protecting war
criminals from
prosecution

Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy in Focus
senior analyst, is a professor of politics
and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the
University of San Francisco.
This essay was first published in Foreign
Policy in Focus, a project of the Institute for
Policy Studies, at www. ips-dc.org

Read the

Goldstone
Report
Download the full 454-page Report of the
United Nations Fact-finding Mission
on the Gaza Conflict free of charge at
www.coldtype.net/Assets.09/pdfs/1109.Goldstone.pdf
November 2009 | TheReader 23

Defending Against Kids?

Self-defence stories
from Gaza

Paul J. Balles views Israel’s disinformation that its attack on Gaza
was defensive against the background of the horrendous injuries
which it deliberately inflicted on Gaza’s civilian population.*

Amira Qirm lay
on a hospital bed
with her right leg
in plaster, and held
together by a line
of steel pins dug
deep into her skin.
For several days
after her operation
Amira, 15, was
unable to speak,
and even now
talks only in
a low whisper

A

ccording to Amnesty International, some 1,400 Palestinians were
killed in the 22-day Israeli offensive between December 27, 2008
and January 17, 2009, which agrees broadly
with Palestinian figures. More than 900 of
these were civilians, including 300 children
and 115 women.
Two-year-old Amal Abed Rabbo, one of
the 300 children casualties, died in an Israeli attack outside her house in the village
of Izbit Abed Rabbo, Gaza, on 7 January
2009.
The UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report called Israel’s military assault
on Gaza “a deliberately disproportionate
attack designed to punish, humiliate and
terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to
work and to provide for itself, and to force
upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability”.
Gabriela Shalev, the Israeli ambassador
to the United Nations, quickly rejected the
report, saying it failed to take into account
that the operation was in “self-defence”.
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed with
her right leg in plaster, and held together
by a line of steel pins dug deep into her
skin. For several days after her operation
Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even
now talks only in a low whisper.
Amira watched her father die in the

24 TheReader | November 2009

street outside their home in Gaza, then
heard another shell land and kill her brother Ala’a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16; and
then she spent three days alone, injured
and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a
neighbour’s abandoned house.
Israel’s argument: the war was a response to Palestinian rocket fire and therefore an act of self-defence.
Muhammad Balousha, aged two, waited
constantly by the door listening carefully
to the sounds around him, hoping to recognize the sounds of his five sisters coming home. He does not know that, when
on that one night they said goodnight and
went to sleep, it was forever.
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict,
three of them civilians. In total in the past
eight years, 20 people in Israel have died
from rocket and mortar attacks launched
by militants in Gaza.
Abdul Rahim Abu Halima, 14, was killed
when a white phosphorous artillery shell
hit his home on January 4. He died with
two of his brothers, Zayed, eight, and
Hamza, six, his sister Shahed, who was 15
months old, and their father Saadallah, 45.
Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the
Hudson Institute, writes in The Jerusalem
Post that the charges of human rights violations are just more of “that same old bashIsrael agenda”.
A boy from the Abu Halima family lost

Defending Against Kids?
his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
Israeli Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi has
difficulty believing the soldiers’ testimonies
that they intentionally harmed Palestinian
civilians, because the Israel Defence Force
is a “moral army”.
A Palestinian ambulance arrives with a
patient who is barely 10-years-old and his
head is wrapped in a bandage and he is unconscious and on manual ventilation. He
was shot in the head by Israeli sniper fire.
Prime Minister Netanyahu says Israeli
forces were exercising their right to selfdefence.
Neurosurgeon Dr Ahmed Yaha cata-

logued horrific injuries such as babies being shot in the head, babies with broken
spines due to being thrown by shell blasts.
People burned to the bone by white phosphorus, nail bombs causing brutal injuries
and a new phenomena, micro-pellets, that
leave no entry wound but cause fatal internal injuries.
In self-defence?
CT
Paul J. Balles is a retired American
university professor and freelance writer
who has lived in the Middle East
for many years. For more information, see
www.pballes.com.
*Descriptive images of the Gaza children are
from Eman Mohammed’s diary

Israeli Chief
of Staff Gabi
Ashkenazi has
difficulty believing
the soldiers’
testimonies that
they intentionally
harmed Palestinian
civilians, because
the Israel
Defence Force
is a “moral army”

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WRITING WORTH READING

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ISSUE 40

l

O cTO b E R 2 0 0 9

The waR
on dissenT

John Pilger tells how a new movie distorts the truth about Australia’s
complicity in the murder of six journalists in East Timor
PatrIck robbINS, ShamuS cookE aND DavID SwaNSoN

John Pilger points out parallels between recent British government
attacks on postal workers and the assault on miners 25 years ago

Unmatched
since Margaret
Thatcher’s
transfer of public
wealth to a new
gross elite, the
sale, or theft,
will include the
Channel Tunnel rail
link, bridges, the
student loan bank,
school playing
fields, libraries
and public
housing estates

T

he postal workers’ struggle is as
vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The
campaign against them is part of
a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate
world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed
to win, the regression that now touches all
lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace.
A third of British children now live in lowincome or impoverished families. One in
five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education.
And now the Brown government is to
mount a “fire sale” of public assets and services worth £16bn. Unmatched since Margaret Thatcher’s transfer of public wealth
to a new gross elite, the sale, or theft, will
include the Channel Tunnel rail link, bridges, the student loan bank, school playing
fields, libraries and public housing estates.
The plunder of the National Health Service
and public education is already under way.
The common thread is adherence to
the demands of an opulent, sub-criminal
minority exposed by the 2008 collapse of
Wall Street and of the City of London, now
rescued with hundreds of billions in public
money and still unregulated with a single
stringent condition imposed by the government. Goldman Sachs, which enjoys a personal connection with the Prime Minister,

26 TheReader | November 2009

is to give employees record average individual pay and bonus packages of £500,000.
The Financial Times now offers a service
called How to Spend It.
None of this is accountable to the public, whose view was expressed at the last
election in 2005: New Labour won with
the support of barely a fifth of the British adult population. For every five people
who voted Labour, eight did not vote at all.
This was not apathy, as the media pretend,
but a strike by the public – like the postal
workers are today on strike. The issues are
broadly the same: the bullying and hypocrisy of contagious, undemocratic power.
Two deliveries a day
Since coming to office, New Labour has done
its best to destroy the Post Office as a highly
productive public institution valued with affection by the British people. Not long ago,
you posted a letter anywhere in the country
and it reached its destination the following morning. There were two deliveries a
day, and collections on Sundays. The best of
Britain, which is ordinary life premised on
a sense of community, could be found at a
local post office, from the Highlands to the
Pennines to the inner cities, where pensions,
income support, child benefit and incapacity benefit were drawn, and the elderly, the
awkward, the inarticulate and the harried
were treated humanely.

Fighting The Union
At my local post office in south London, if an elderly person failed to turn up
on pension day, he or she would get a visit
from the postmistress, Smita Patel, often
with groceries. She did this for almost 20
years until the government closed down
this “lifeline of human contact”, as the local Labour MP called it, along with more
than 150 other local London branches. The
Post Office executives who faced the anger of our community at a local church –
unknown to us, the decision had already
been taken – were not even aware that
the Patels made a profit. What mattered
was ideology; the branch had to go. Mention of public service brought puzzlement
to their faces.
Half the price
The postal workers, having this year doubled annual profits to £321m, have had to
listen to specious lectures from Peter Mandelson, a twice-disgraced figure risen from
the murk of New Labour, about “urgent
modernisation”.
The truth is, the Royal Mail offers a quality service at half the price of its privatised
rivals Deutsche Post and TNT. In dealing
with new technology, postal workers have
sought only consultation about their working lives and the right not to be abused –
like the postal worker who was spat upon
by her manager, then sacked while he was
promoted; and the postman with 17 years’
service and not a single complaint to his
name who was sacked on the spot for failing to wear his cycle helmet. Watch the near
frenzy with which your postie now delivers.
A middle-aged man has to run much of his
route in order to keep to a preordained and
unrealistic time. If he fails, he is disciplined

and kept in his place by the fear that thousands of jobs are at the whim of managers.
Communication Workers Union negotiators describe intransigent executives with
a hidden agenda – just as the National
Coal Board masked Thatcher’s strictly political goal of destroying the miners’ union.
The collaborative journalists’ role is unchanged, too. Mark Lawson, who pontificates about middlebrow cultural matters
for the BBC and the Guardian and receives
many times the remuneration of a postal
worker, dispensed a Sun-style diatribe on
10 October. Waffling about the triumph
of email and how the postal service was a
“bystander” to the internet when, in fact,
it has proven itself a commercial beneficiary, Lawson wrote: “The outcome [of the
strike] will decide whether Billy Hayes of
the CWU will, like [Arthur] Scargill, be remembered as someone who presided over
the destruction of the industry he was
meant to represent.”
The record is clear that Scargill and the
miners were fighting against the wholesale
destruction of an industry that was long
planned for ideological reasons. The miners’ enemies included the most subversive,
brutal and sinister forces of the British
state, aided by journalists – as Lawson’s
Guardian colleague Seumas Milne documents in his landmark work, The Enemy
Within. Postal workers deserve the support of all honest, decent people, who are
reminded that they may be next on the list
if they remain silent.
CT

Watch the near
frenzy with which
your postie now
delivers. A middleaged man has to
run much of his
route in order
to keep to a
preordained and
unrealistic time

John Pilger received the Sydney Peace Prize
on November 5. His latest book, Freedom
Next Time, is now available in
paperback

The S-Word and Dr
Kervorkian’s accountant
Greg Palast says the solution to America’s healthcare crisis
is simple: Eliminate insurance companies from the industry

The government
builds hospitals,
hires doctors and,
when you need the
service, you just
go and get it. It’s
kind of like the fire
department. When
your house is on
fire, you don’t call
your fire insurance
company, you
call THE FIRE
DEPARTMENT
We care first
about the service,
not the payment.

T

ell me where it hurts, Mr. President. What’s killing you, Barack, is
what’s killing us all: an evil germ
called “Medical Loss Ratio.”
“Medical Loss Ratio” [MLR] is the fancy
term used by health insurance companies
for their slice, their take-out, their pound of
flesh, their gross - very gross - profit.
The “MLR” is the difference between
what you pay an insurance company and
what that insurer pays out to doctors, hospitals and pharmacists for your medical
care.
I’ve totted it up from the raw stats: The
“MLR,” insurance companies’ margins, is
about to top - holy mama! - a quarter trillion dollars a year. That’s $2.7 trillion over
the next decade.
Until the 1990’s, insurers skimmed only
about a nickel on the dollar for their “service,” Wendell Potter told me. Potter is the
CIGNA insurance company PR man who
came in from the cold to tell us about what
goes down inside the health insurance gold
mine. Today, Potter notes (and I’ve checked
his accuracy), porky operators like AIG
have kicked up their Loss Ratio by nearly
500 percent.
The industries’ slice is growing to nearly
a quarter of your insurance bill. All of it just
paperwork and profiteering.
President Obama is never going to
pull the insurance company piggies from

28 TheReader | November 2009

a trough this big, especially when the industry has made room for Congressional
snouts.
The only solution to Loss Ratio piggery
is to kill the pigs: eliminate health insurers
from the health industry entirely.
We can’t cure our ills, as our president
has attempted, by attacking the problem
ass-backwards. No, Mr. Obama, we don’t
need HEALTH INSURANCE for everyone,
we need HEALTH CARE for everyone.
There’s a giant difference. Instead of concentrating on PAYMENT, we need to focus
solely on providing the health SERVICE.
From my London days writing for the
Guardian, I can tell you the British do NOT
have national health insurance. They have
a National Health Service.
The government builds hospitals, hires
doctors and, when you need the service,
you just go and get it. It’s kind of like the
fire department. When your house is on
fire, you don’t call your fire insurance company, you call THE FIRE DEPARTMENT.
We care first about the service, not the payment.
The British government hires the doctors, like firemen, and Brits use them, like
firemen, as they need them.
It works. My mother-in-law, a nurse,
on a visit to England, was stunned at the
speed, quality and absence of mad paperwork to fix her broken arm.

Medical Madness / 1
But, you might say, that’s, that’s SOCIALISM! Well, yes, it is. And I’m not afraid
to use the S-word: Socialized Medicine. Just
like America’s Socialized Fire Departments.
(Fun fact: socialized, i.e. publicly funded,
fire departments were ‘invented’ by the
revolutionary Ben Franklin.)
And Yes We Can get socialized medicine
passed into law.
Really. It’s simple: we sneak it in with
the kids.
Johnson’s lesson
We can learn from Lyndon Johnson’s sale
of Socialist Medicare. Johnson knew that
no one could argue that Granny could do
without a doctor. Can the “Pro-Life” Republicans now tell us that pregnant moms
and children ages 0 to 3 should be denied
care? Therefore, to the Medicare program
for those 65-or-older, we simply add “Kiddie Care,” for those from Negative 9 months
through age 3.
But instead of the wallet-busting Medicare system, in which doctors and hospitals are paid for each suture, bag of blood
and pat on the head, Kiddie Care will be
provided by Kiddie Care Service salaried
doctors.
How do we get doctors (who now AVERAGE $240,575 a year) to take well-paid,
but not pig-paid, posts? We grab’m while
they’re young. We pay doctors the full cost
of their medical education; and we treat
them as humans during internship, not
as in the current system where interns are
treated as medi-slaves. In return for the
public paying for their medical education,
the public gets the young doctors’ ten-year
commitment to work for the health service
at a reasonable salary. That’s not my invention. The free-education idea for staffing a
national health service had long ago been
proposed by that wily old dog Ted Kennedy. (Damn, we miss him.)
Once the first wave of three-year-olds is
about to turn four and their families face
having to buy them health insurance, these
millions of parents will become an unstop-

pable army of lobbyists screaming for the
extension of Kiddie Care to age four, then
to age five, then to age six and so on. Get
it?
Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, I am another bleeding heart trying to sneak socialized medicine into America. Yes, I am trying to rid
us of the “free-market” insurers who are
causing the bleeding. Health insurers are as
useful to our health care system as a bicycle
is useful to a goldfish.
There ain’t no such thing as a “free market” in medical care, as there is a free market in food. You can eat peanut butter instead of dining at Maxime’s. But you can’t
tell the surgeon, “No thanks, I can’t afford a
new kidney this week - I’ll just have a broken arm.”
A free-market for-profit insurance system means that, when you need a new
pancreas, your fate is left to an insurance
company computer programmed by Franz
Kafka, Dr. Kevorkian and his accountant.
It’s you versus the Medical Loss Ratio.
Good luck.
In olden days, doctors would attach
leeches to suck a patient’s blood. Today,
we have insurance companies’ Medical
Loss Ratio. Both can kill you. If Obama and
America want to end this sickness in the
body politic, start with Dr. Kennedy’s surefire cure: a national health service for kids
- and get rid of the bloodsuckers.
I Quit: A Personal Note
I learned of the Kiddie Care solution during my brief and ill-starred tenure at the
Center for Hospital Administration Studies
at the University of Chicago “Billings” Hospital. I couldn’t make up that name. Years
later, they hired Michelle Obama as their
vice president for community affairs.
In my time, three decades ago, “Billings”
handled the affairs of that poor community
by shipping the uninsured, sometimes bleeding, to poor-folks hospitals. One wounded
patient died on the poverty shuttle.
I quit, and swore that one day I’d write
about it. I just did.
CT

All over Kabul,
men are tensely
holding AK-47s;
some are pointing
machine guns from
flatbed trucks.
But the really big
guns, of course,
are being wielded
from Washington

Greg Palast is
author of the
New York Times
bestseller, The
Best Democracy
Money Can Buy.
His investigations
for BBC TV and
Democracy Now!
can be seen by
subscribing to
Palast’s reports at
GregPalast.com

November 2009 | TheReader 29

Medical Madness / 2

The next phase of
healthcare apartheid

Healthcare reform has degenerated into a sick joke at the expense
of the nation’s most needy people, writes Norman Solomon

Not long ago,
we were told
that the Obama
administration was
aiming for a public
option that could
provide coverage
to one out of every
four Americans.
Now the figure is
around one out of
every fifty

I

n Washington, “healthcare reform” has
degenerated into a sick joke. At this
point, only spinners who’ve succumbed
to their own vertigo could use the word
“robust” to describe the public option in
the healthcare bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.
“A main argument was that a public
plan would save people money,” the New
York Times has noted. But the insurance
industry – claiming to want a level playing field – has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. “After House
Democratic leaders unveiled their health
care bill [on October 29], the Congressional
Budget Office said the public plan would
cost more than private plans and only 6
million people would sign up.”
At its best, “the public option” was a
weak remedy for the disastrous ailments of
the healthcare system in the United States.
But whatever virtues the public option may
have offered were stripped from the bill en
route to the House floor.
What remains is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will launch this country into a
new phase of healthcare apartheid.
People who scrape together enough
money to buy health insurance will discover that they’re riding in the back of the nation’s healthcare bus. The most “affordable”
policies will be the ones with the highest
deductibles and the worst coverage.

30 TheReader | November 2009

We’re hearing that large numbers of
lower-income Americans will be provided
with Medicaid coverage in the next decade.
Translation: If funding holds up, they’ll get
to hang onto a bottom rung of the healthcare ladder. Many will not be able to get
the medical help they need, from primary
care providers or specialists.
Not long ago, we were told that the
Obama administration was aiming for a
public option that could provide coverage
to one out of every four Americans. Now
the figure is around one out of every fifty.
Not long ago, the idea was that taxpayerfunded subsidies were to be used only for
the public option. But now the entire concept has been hijacked by and for the private insurance industry. As House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi put it on October 8, private
insurance companies “are going to get 50
million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers.”
Pelosi was making the argument that
the least the insurance industry could do,
in return, would be to accept a higher level
of taxation. But her comment was a telling
acknowledgment that all the “public option” proposals now provide a massive funnel from the US Treasury to the insurance
conglomerates. The individual mandate is
a monumental giveaway to private insurance firms.
The specter of “healthcare reform” that

Medical Madness / 2
requires individuals to stretch their personal finances for often-abysmal insurance
coverage is the worst of all worlds – government intrusion for corporate benefit
without any guarantees of decent health
coverage.
In effect, the individual-mandate requirement tells people that obtaining
health coverage is ultimately their own responsibility – and the quality of the coverage is beside the point. In essence, when
it comes to guaranteeing quality healthcare
for all, the gist of the policy is: “Let’s not,
and say we did.”
The predictable result is reinforcement
of vast – and often deadly – inequities in
access to healthcare.
With Washington making such a corporate mess of “healthcare reform,” the best
way to get what we need – healthcare for
all as a human right – will be to enact
single-payer healthcare in one state after
another.
But the House Democratic leadership
has not been content to serve up a grimly
pathetic “healthcare reform” bill. Speaker
Pelosi has used her political leverage to

Hurwitt’s eye

quash Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s
amendment – approved months ago by
the Education and Labor Committee –
that would grant waivers so that states
could create their own single-payer system.
Pelosi removed the Kucinich amendment
from the House bill.
The California legislature has twice
passed a strong single-payer bill, both times
vetoed by the state’s current execrable governor.
The official position of the California
Democratic Party is unequivocally in favor
of single-payer healthcare. And yet Nancy
Pelosi, a California Democrat, did what she
could to sabotage the single-payer position
of her own party in her own state.
Sickening.
CT

In essence,
when it comes
to guaranteeing
quality healthcare
for all, the gist
of the policy is:
“Let’s not,
and say we did”

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national
Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign,
launched by Progressive Democrats of
America. He is the author of a dozen books
including War Made Easy: How Presidents
and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
For more information, go to:
www.normansolomon.com

Mark Hurwitt

November 2009 | TheReader 31

Recession Blues

Room with a view

So the recession’s over? Not according to freelance
writer Dave Lindorff, who knows a few people – himself
included – who are still struggling through grim times

When I read that
housing prices
are picking up,
or that the stock
market is back
over 10,000 again,
it would be easy
to start imagining
that things are
starting to look
up after the worst
recession since
World War II.

I

’m the first to admit that you can get a
little out of touch working as a freelance
writer, if you aren’t careful. Here I am
up in my upstairs garret, surrounded
by my books and computer paraphernalia,
my phones and two cats, and my sources of
information tend to be the piles of newspapers I have delivered, my wife, who works
with other human beings at a university,
my son, who goes to an urban high school,
and, of course, the internet.
When I get out, it’s either to do solitary
repair work to rescue my barn, or to get a
coffee at the local café.
So when I read that housing prices are
picking up, or that the stock market is back
over 10,000 again, it would be easy to start
imagining that things are starting to look
up after the worst recession since World
War II.
But then, I do have personal evidence
that this is hardly the case.
Take my work. Business Week magazine, a publication for which I have written for some 17 years, nearly folded and
has been sold for a song by McGraw-Hill
to Bloomberg, where it will operate as a
shadow of its former self. One editor there
wrote recently for advice because his wife
had been stiffed on a $3000 writing assignment for some company, and he wanted
to know how to pursue the case in small
claims court. He said they need that mon-

32 TheReader | November 2009

ey, because his current income is precarious, given the planned staff cuts Bloomberg
will be making.
Another publication for which I’ve written for nearly as long, Treasury & Risk magazine, cut my word rate by 22% (and shortened my assignments), effectively giving me
a 33% pay cut. Another mainstay publication, which will remain nameless, cut my
word rate by 20%, and also cut back on
length of assignments, making that an approximately 30% pay cut. Two other publications simply folded, while a fifth cut back
on my assigned articles by 80%.
Grim news
That’s pretty grim news if you’re me. I
mean, I’m better off than the doughty
workers at Republic Windows in Chicago,
who lost their jobs altogether, and were
actually being stiffed out of their last paychecks and vacation pay until they fought
back by organizing a sit-down strike and a
national campaign against Bank of America, which was refusing to honor a line of
credit their runaway employer had with it
(despite having just won some $25 billion
in taxpayer backing itself).
But I can hardly complain. The editor at
one publication that was cutting me back
had her own salary cut 5% and had the
matching contribution to her 401(k) plan
eliminated. Another editor had it worse

Recession Blues
though: she and her colleagues on staff got
hit with a 10% pay cut and had their health
plan summarily terminated. In its place
they got a so-called health savings account
plan. But get this; it’s not the standard old
one where the employer makes a payment
into each employee’s account from which
the employee is expected to pay for medical
expenses. In this niggardly scheme or scam
(the insurance industry euphemistically
calls it “consumer-driven health care!), the
employee has to put the money into the
“plan,” which is really just a glorified way
of saying that the employee has to front the
money to pay for medical care. After spending $3,200 in a year, then there is a major
medical plan that will supposedly pay for
80% of expenses at a list of preferred providers. But it gets worse. My editor says she
can’t just go to any doctor or hospital, pay
the cost, and have that payment deducted
from her annual $3,200 responsibility. She
can only deduct what the plan provider
(Aetna Insurance) decides is a “reasonable”
charge – an amount that most physicians
or hospitals would laugh at. The reality,
then, is that this editor will probably have
to pay maybe $5-6,000 in annual medical
bills before she can get anything from the
major medical insurance plan on offer.
Now you could argue that I’m just looking at the publishing industry here, which
we all know is in grim shape with collapsing ads and readership. But it’s more than
that.
When I go out to buy building supplies
at my local Home Depot for my barn repair and restoration project, the parking lot
on a Saturday is not full of cars. In fact, it’s
easy to get a slot near the exit door to load
my lumber. I use the contractor’s checkout,
because there aren’t any contractors, which
tells you all you need to know about the
state of the housing market where I live in
suburban southeastern Pennsylvania.
I know that things are still hard for a lot
of people around here, because my credit
line was frozen, and I learned from someone
at my bank that they were “reassessing” all

their home-equity lines of credit in view of
declining property values. I was told I could
apply for a new credit line, but it would be
at an extortionate rate – this at a time that
the effective interest rate is almost 0% at
the Federal Reserve. In other words, banks
are simply not extending credit these days,
which to me says, kiss the idea of economic
recovery any time soon goodbye. I got another indication of this when my daughter,
a teacher in New York City, called to complain that American Express had jacked
the interest rate on her card’s unpaid balance from 9% to 34% – a level reminiscent
more of a Mafia loan-sharking operation
than bank revolving credit loan.

My daughter, a
teacher in New
York City, called
to complain that
American Express
had jacked the
interest rate on
her card’s unpaid
balance from 9%
to 34% – a level
reminiscent more
of a Mafia
loan-sharking
operation than
bank revolving
credit loan

Time to mow
Then there’s my friend down the street.
He’s an engineer. He used to be busy all the
time designing local buildings with architects and his lawn was perpetually a mess.
But these days he’s free to mow his lawn
and rake the leaves all he wants. Nobody’s
building things. His wife isn’t around much,
though, to keep him company. She was a
vice president at Wyeth, but lost her job in
that company’s merger with Pfizer, and has
been jobless now for over nine months. Her
time is spent on the road searching for a
new job in a hugely contracted industry.
The local grocery store, though it seems
busy enough (no surprise since nobody’s
eating out these days, as witness the number of closed restaurants in the area, particularly the chains in the malls), has laid
off workers on every shift, probably not because of declining sales, but because they
can get away with it – every worker is so
worried about the economy that they’re
willing to accept any lousy conditions, including a speed-up, as long as they are still
working. (Look at me, I’m still writing at the
same publications, for lower word rates.)
The only guy I see who’s doing well
these days is my local mechanic. His gas
sales may be down, as people cut back
because of lower incomes, fewer jobs to
commute to, and higher gas prices, but his
November 2009 | TheReader 33

Recession Blues
When my son
expressed shock
that one in four
of his “kills” had
been civilian, the
recruiter said
soothingly, “Don’t
feel bad. It’s war.
That’s really not a
bad percentage”

Dave Lindorff is
a Philadelphiabased journalist
and columnist.
He is the author
of Marketplace
Medicine: The Rise
of the For-Profit
Hospital Chains
(Bantam Books,
1992) and The Case
for Impeachment
(St. Martin’s, 2006).
His work is available
at www.thiscantbe
happening.net

repair business is going gangbusters. His
lot is always full of cars in for repairs these
days, because after all, who is going to go
out and buy a new one with the job situation so iffy?
So even confined as I am in my little
writer’s world here, it’s evident that we’re
in a nasty spot.
Now the good news
The only good news lately was a report
that the Army is closing down its Army
Experience Center in the Frankford Mall in
Northeast Philadelphia. Set up a year ago,
the Experience Center was a video-game
addict’s paradise – a kind of “Pleasure Island” where the mostly male gamers get to
engage in ultra realistic mass killing, with
trim, muscled sports-shirt wearing recruiters cruising the floor encouraging them with
lines like, “You’re a born soldier! That’s the
best shooting I’ve seen all day!”
There are even two rooms there with
mock-ups of a full-sized armed Humvee
and a Blackhawk helicopter gunship cabin,
where kids can man realistic M-30 machine
guns and shoot at realistic attackers who
are shown in a 3D Cinerama video setting.
(I brought my 15-year-old son and his friend
there for a few hours, and after the three
of us had done a heart-pumping run on
the Humvee, and shot up everything that
jumped out at us, we were complimented
by the recruiter, who told us proudly that

we’d only had a 25% error rate. “What’s
an error rate?” my son asked. “Only 25%
of your targets were civilians,” he replied
matter-of-factly. When my son expressed
shock that one in four of his “kills” had
been civilian, the recruiter said soothingly,
“Don’t feel bad. It’s war. That’s really not a
bad percentage.”)
Apparently the Experience Center, which
was a multi-million-dollar experiment that
the Army hoped to expand nationwide, is
no longer needed now because, according
to the Pentagon, the economic crisis has
pushed up recruitment numbers to above
annual targets. Jobless kids are fighting to
get in the doors at recruiters’ offices. (The
determined protests organized by local
anti-war groups like Veterans for Peace, by
making the Experience Center a national
news controversy, may have also led the
Army to abandon its Pleasure Island plan
to sucker local kids into becoming armed
jackasses for the nation’s imperial project
in Afghanistan.)
So even the good news isn’t good around
here.
But at least I’ve managed to get the barn
repaired.
Now maybe I should get some chickens
and a goat to go in it. At over $3.50 a dozen
and $4 a half gallon, the organic eggs and
organic milk we buy are both getting pretty
pricey on a writer’s budget, and it looks like
things aren’t about to get better.
CT

Michael I. Niman tells how the Feds busted a Twitter tweeter
and impounded Curious George and Buffy videos in a terror probe

I

couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
This story begins last month at the
G-20 economic summit in Pittsburgh,
where finance ministers and leaders
from the 20 richest nations met to scheme
on how to prop up global capitalism for
another year. Protesters from around the
world came to Pittsburgh to demand economic justice from the G-20. And New
York City social worker Elliot Madison
came to Pittsburgh to work with the Tin
Can Communications Collective a group of
anarchist communications activists providing real-time logistical reporting for, as they
explain on their Web site, “activists fighting
the state and capitalism.”
By all accounts, Madison spent his time
in Pittsburgh monitoring police calls and
using Twitter to report real-time police
movements around the G-20 protests. In
one contentious tweet, Madison reported
on a police order closing a street near the
protest and ordering everyone on that
street to disperse.
Anyone subsequently on that street
would be arrested, whether or not they
were informed of the closing. People monitoring the Tin Can tweets or subscribing to
Tin Can text messages knew to avoid the
closure area and hence avoid arrest by eschewing lawless behavior they otherwise
might not have known was lawless. MSNBC and local news organizations also pro-

vided live coverage of the demonstrations.
Madison’s tweeting came to an end,
however, after the Pennsylvania State Police
stormed his hotel room, guns drawn, and,
according to the New York Times, arrested
him for “hindering apprehension or prosecution,” “criminal use of a communication
facility,” and “possession of instruments of
crime.” The hindering charge stems from
the tweet in which he essentially acted as
a reporter, reporting real-time news about
the police dispersal order and street closure. By reporting on the closure and hence
dissuading people from breaking the law,
Madison allegedly hindered prosecution;
thanks to him, there were no laws broken
and no one to prosecute.
One could charge a high school guidance counselor with a similar crime if she
convinced a student to forgo illicit drug
abuse and hence avoid prosecution as a
drug offender.
If the aim of the police was to clear the
street, Madison’s tweets would appear to
be an aid rather than a hindrance. If the
police’s aim, however, was to arrest as
many protestors as possible before President Barack Obama arrived at the summit and thereby undermine the protesters’
right to demonstrate, Madison’s reporting
could derail their plan.
In a legal sense, Madison’s arrest is a
historic first. If Madison broke the law, so

One could
charge a high
school guidance
counselor with a
similar crime if
she convinced a
student to forgo
illicit drug abuse
and hence avoid
prosecution as a
drug offender

November 2009 | TheReader 35

Terror Tweets
Like a journalist,
Madison’s tweets
were available
to the public, as
anyone could
subscribe to
Tin Can’s Twitter
site – which,
it turns out,
was subscribed to
and monitored
by the police

has every journalist who ever covered live
breaking news involving the police. My local news radio station, for example, reported this morning that state troopers are intensifying enforcement of New York’s ban
on cell phone use by motorists on the New
York Thruway. If Madison is a criminal, so
is the reporter who put this story together,
and the management of the radio station
that aired it. Like Madison’s report, this
news piece will warn people not to break
the law, and hence help them avoid arrest.
Madison, like a “live eye” TV or radio
journalist, is reporting ongoing news. Madison’s prosecution is a chilling assault on
the First Amendment. And like a city beat
reporter, Madison legally monitored police
communications with a scanner that any
hobbyist can pick up at Radio Shack. Also
nothing illegal here. And like a journalist,
Madison’s tweets were available to the
public, as anyone could subscribe to Tin
Can’s Twitter site – which, it turns out, was
subscribed to and monitored by the police.
In an ironic twist on this story, the American Civil Liberties Union has launched an
investigation into the constitutionality of
the street closures and orders for law-abiding protesters to disperse. In retrospect, it
appears more likely that it was Madison’s
accusers, and not Madison, who broke the
law in Pittsburgh.
The selective prosecution of Madison
appears to have more to do with Tin Can’s
stated support for the demonstrators than
with any true violation of law. Disseminating logistical information to demonstrators (Tin Can also tweeted about workshops and shared meals) is a tradition as
old as organized political demonstrations.
By charging Madison, Pennsylvania is attempting to criminalize dissent.
Madison was eventually released after
posting a $30,000 bail bond. You could
write this off as the actions of a wayward
police unit or an overcaffeinated Pennsylvania prosecutor – except one week later
the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force
stormed Madison’s Queens home at 6am,

36 TheReader | November 2009

knocking down his front door with a battering ram and raiding his home with over
a dozen officers, guns drawn.
Buffy the Vampire Terrorist
After searching Madison’s house for 16
hours, police carted away and impounded
a Curious George doll, passports, computers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs, refrigerator magnets, a needlepoint portrait of
Vladimir Lenin, letters, tax records, books,
phones, flags, photos, and, according to the
New York Post, gas masks, hammers, triangular pieces of metal, some kind of ammo,
and about a liquid ounce of mercury.
None of this quite adds up to terrorism. There are house painters, basement
cleaners, and military buffs who also have
gas masks, for example. They are also now
common among journalists who regularly
cover political demonstrations, and they’re
are often carried by cautious demonstrators. The need for gas masks at political
rallies is an unfortunate reality in a democracy seemingly in decline.
During the G-20 summit, MSNBC cameras caught a police tear gas attack on
what appeared to be peaceful protestors.
Perhaps Madison should have brought the
masks to Pittsburgh. And perhaps he also
should have brought ear protection, as police made history by using a sonic weapon
whose manufacturer warns that it could
cause permanent hearing loss in an effort
to disperse demonstrators. While regularly
employed in overseas military operations,
I believe this was the first time it had been
used domestically. Police also sniped the
crowd with rubber bullets, a favorite weapon of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Who knows why someone would have
mercury around the house? I recall stories
about my dentist giving me a vial of the
shiny toxic liquid when I was about six, to
reward me for not screaming in the chair.
(We lost track of it after my brother spilled
it on the carpet and my mom vacuumed
it up.) And I don’t even want to speculate
on what was in those ancient bottles of

Terror Tweets
photographic chemicals left behind in my
deceased grandfather’s darkroom. Sure,
it’s disturbing that there was mercury in
Madison’s home, but search any home and
you’re likely to score a weird haul. This is
why our constitution protects against unwarranted searches – so the government
can’t target an individual and then go
fishing for a crime. The law also protects
people’s right to possess items far more
dangerous than hammers and heavy metals. There are more guns than people, for
example, in the United States. Americans
view having this stuff as a sacred right and
invading someone’s home and seizing their
belongings as a form of state terror.
Madison’s real crime, it seems, is being a
self-proclaimed anarchist, which is no more
illegal than being a self-proclaimed Demo-

crat or Lutheran. His tweets were not more
informative or subversive than MSNBC’s
live coverage of the G-20 protests. And
they certainly weren’t much different than
the Twitter chatter posted by the pro-democracy protesters in Iran, whose right to
tweet was so voraciously defended by the
US State Department. It seems the Pennsylvania State Police, and subsequently the
FBI, may have taken a page from Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s playbook.
CT

Madison’s real
crime, it seems,
is being a selfproclaimed
anarchist, which
is no more illegal
than being a
self-proclaimed
Democrat or
Lutheran

Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of
journalism and media studies at Buffalo
State College. His previous Artvoice columns
are available at www.artvoice.com,
archived at www.mediastudy.com, and
available globally through syndication.

Jo Comerford tells how the Pentagon continues to cash in,
while everyone else is forced to tighten their belts

55% of next year’s
discretionary
spending – that
is, the spending
negotiated by the
President and
Congress – will
go to the military
just to keep it
chugging along

S

o you thought the Pentagon was
already big enough? Well, what do
you know, especially with the price
of the American military slated
to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?
So, let’s sing the praises of perpetual war.
We’d better, since right now every forecast
in sight tells us that it’s our future.
The tired peace dividend tug boat left
the harbor two decades ago, dragging with
it laughable hopes for universal health care
and decent public education. Now, the
mighty USS War Dividend is preparing to
set sail. The economic weather reports may
be lousy and the seas choppy, but one thing
is guaranteed: that won’t stop it.
The United States, of course, long ago
captured first prize in the global arms race.
It now spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, even as the spending of our
rogue enemies and former enemies – Cuba,
Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria
– much in the headlines for their prospective armaments, makes up a mere 1% of the
world military budget. Still, when you’re a
military superpower focused on big-picture
thinking, there’s no time to dawdle on the
details.
And be reasonable, who could expect
the US to fight two wars and maintain
more than 700 bases around the world for
less than the $704 billion we’ll shell out to

38 TheReader | November 2009

the Pentagon in 2010? But here’s what few
Americans grasp and you aren’t going to
read about in your local paper either: according to Department of Defense projections, the baseline military budget – just
the bare bones, not those billions in warfighting extras – is projected to increase
by 2.5% each year for the next 10 years. In
other words, in the next decade the basic Pentagon budget will grow by at least
$133.1 billion, or 25%.
When it comes to the health of the war
dividend in economically bad times, if that’s
not good news, what is? As anyone at the
Pentagon will be quick to tell you, it’s a real
bargain, a steal, at least compared to the
two-term presidency of George W. Bush.
Then, that same baseline defense budget
grew by an astonishing 38%.
If the message isn’t already clear enough,
let me summarize: it’s time for the Departments of Housing and Urban Development,
Transportation, Health and Human Services, Labor, Education, and Veterans Affairs
to suck it up. After all, Americans, however
unemployed, foreclosed, or unmedicated,
will only be truly secure if the Pentagon
is exceedingly well fed. According to the
Office of Management and Budget, what
that actually means is this: 55% of next
year’s discretionary spending – that is, the
spending negotiated by the President and
Congress – will go to the military just to

The Price Of War
keep it chugging along.
The 14 million American children in
poverty, the millions of citizens who will
remain without health insurance (even if
some version of the Baucus plan is passed),
the 7.6 million people who have lost jobs
since 2007, all of them will have to take a
number. The same is true of the kinds of
projects needed to improve the country’s
disintegrating infrastructure, including the
25% of US drinking water that was given a
barely passing “D” by the American Society of Civil Engineers in a 2009 study.
And don’t imagine that this is a terrible
thing either! There’s no shame in paying
$400 for every gallon of gas used in Afghanistan, especially when the Marines
alone are reported to consume 800,000
gallons of it each day. After all, the evidence
is in: a few whiners aside, Americans want
our tax dollars used this way. Otherwise
we’d complain, and no one makes much of
a fuss about war or the ever-rising numbers
of dollars going to it anymore.
$915.1 billion in total Iraq and Afghanistan war spending to date has been a nobrainer, even if it could, theoretically, have
been traded in for the annual salaries of 15
million teachers or 20 million police officers
or for 171 million Pell Grants of approximately $5,350 each for use by American
college and university students.
$1 trillion mark
Next March, we will collectively reach a
landmark in this new version of the American way of life. We will hit the $1 trillion
mark in total Iraq and Afghanistan war
spending with untold years of war-making
to go. No problem. It’s only the proposed
nearly $900 billion for a decade of health
care that we fear will do us in.
Nor is it the Pentagon’s fault that US
states have laws prohibiting them from
deficit spending. The 48 governors and
state legislatures now struggling with budget deficits should stop complaining and
simply be grateful for their ever smaller
slices of the federal pie. Between 2001 and

2008, federal grant funding for state and
local governments lagged behind the 28%
growth of the federal budget by 14%, while
military spending outpaced federal budget
growth with a 41% increase. There is every reason to believe that this is a trend,
not an anomaly, which means that Title
1, Head Start, Community Development
Block Grants, and the Children’s Health
Insurance Program will just have to make
do with less. In fact, if you want a true
measure of what’s important to our nation,
think of it this way: if you add together the
total 2010 budgets of all those 48 states in
deficit, they won’t even equal projected US
military spending for the same year.
Take the situation of Massachusetts, for
example. Yankee spirit or not, that state
will see a 17.3% decrease in federal grants
in 2010 no matter how hard Governor Deval Patrick wrings his hands. True to the
American way, Patrick’s projected $5 billion
fiscal year 2010 deficit will be his problem
and his alone, as is his state’s recently-announced $600 million budget shortfall for
2009. Blame it on declining tax revenue
and the economic crisis, on things that are
beyond his control. No matter, Patrick will
have to make deep cuts to elderly mental
health services and disabled home-care
programs, and lose large chunks of funding for universal pre-kindergarten, teacher
training, gifted and talented programs in
the schools, and so much more.
Still, that Commonwealth’s politicians
are clearly out of step with the country. On
October 9, 2009, Boston Mayor Thomas
Menino joined with Congressman Barney
Frank in calling on President Obama to find
extra money for such programs by reducing
military spending 25%. President Obama,
cover your ears! Menino, who actually believes that a jump in military spending contributed to “significantly raising the federal
deficit and lowering our economic security,” asked the federal government to be a
better partner to Boston by reinvesting in
its schools, public housing, transportation,
and job-training programs, especially for

Patrick will have
to make deep
cuts to elderly
mental health
services and
disabled homecare programs,
and lose large
chunks of funding
for universal prekindergarten,
teacher training,
gifted and talented
programs in the
schools, and so
much more

November 2009 | TheReader 39

The Price Of War
Don’t expect it
to voluntarily cut
back on major
weapons systems
without finding
others to take
their place. If,
as a result, our
children are less
likely to earn high
school and college
diplomas than we
were, that’s what
prisons and the
Marines are for

young people. Of course, this is delusional,
as any Pentagon budgeteer could tell you.
This isn’t some Head Start playground, after all, it’s the battlefield of American life.
Tough it out, Menino.
One principle has, by now, come to
dominate our American world, even if nobody seems to notice: do whatever it takes
to keep federal dollars flowing for weapons
systems (and the wars that go with them).
And don’t count on the Pentagon to lend a
hand by having a bake sale any time soon;
don’t expect it to voluntarily cut back on
major weapons systems without finding
others to take their place. If, as a result, our
children are less likely to earn high school
and college diplomas than we were, that’s
what prisons and the Marines are for.
So let’s break a bottle of champagne

– or, if the money comes out of a state
budget, Coke – on the bow of the USS
War Dividend! And send it off on its next
voyage without an iceberg in sight. Let the
corks pop. Let the bubbly drown out that
Harvard University report indicating that
45,000 deaths last year were due to a lack
of health insurance.
Hip hip …
CT
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the
National Priorities Project. Previously, she
served as director of programs at the Food
Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed
the American Friends Service Committee’s
justice and peace-related community
organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.
This essay originally appeared at
www.afterdowningstreet.org

“Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been
so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth.” – John Pilger

NEWSPEAK
in the 21st Century
by David Edwards and David Cromwell
Published by Pluto Press, September 2009
Since 2001, Media Lens has encouraged thousands
of readers to challenge the filtered and distorted
version of the world provided by major newspapers
and broadcasters. The media responses, collected
in Newspeak, are an exposé of the arrogance and
servility to power of our leading journalists and
editors, starring Andrew Marr, Alan Rusbridger,
Roger Alton, Jon Snow, Jeremy Bowen and even
George Monbiot.
Picking up where the highly acclaimed and
successful Guardians of Power (2006) left off,
Newspeak is packed with forensic media analysis,
revealing the lethal bias in “balanced” reporting.
Even the “best” UK media - the Guardian, the
Independent, Channel 4 News and the BBC - turn

40 TheReader | November 2009

out to be cheerleaders for government,
business and war.
Alongside an A-Z of BBC propaganda and chapters
on Iraq and climate change, Newspeak focuses on
the demonisation of Iran and Venezuela, the IsraelPalestine conflict, the myth of impartial reporting
and the dark art of smearing dissidents

Torturing Truth

Justice in shades

A damning judgement on British army killings suggests
that officials at every level have covered up torture and murder,
writes George Monbiot

R

obert Ouko was the Kenyan foreign minister with a fatal tendency to speak his mind. In February
1990 he was bundled into a car
which allegedly contained the country’s
permanent secretary for internal security.
His body was found shortly afterwards.
His leg had been broken in two places,
there was a bullet hole in his head and his
corpse had been burnt. The Kenyan police
conducted a thorough investigation and
came to the obvious conclusion that Dr
Ouko had committed suicide. This was the
beginning of the cover-up that persists to
this day, involving police and officials at every level of government.
I was reminded of Dr Ouko after reading the judgement on the case brought to
the High Court in London by Khuder alSweady and other Iraqis1. They were seeking a public inquiry into the events of May
2004, when, they claim, they or their relatives were taken to a British army camp and
tortured or killed. The judges published
their findings on October 31 and ordered
a proper inquiry. It is the most damning
judgement on official collusion and concealment written since Labour came to
power. Total coverage in British newspapers so far amounts to one short article in
the Guardian2.
The claimants say that after a battle at
a checkpoint in southern Iraq, some of the

survivors, including farmers cowering in
nearby fields, were taken by the Princess of
Wales’s Royal Regiment to Camp Abu Naji.
Witnesses say that up to 20 prisoners were
jumped on while their hands were bound,
hit with rocks, had their eyes gouged out
and their genitals crushed and mutilated
and were then hanged or shot3. They claim
that the corpses were then handed to their
families as battlefield casualties.
The Royal Military Police (RMP) were
supposed to have investigated these claims,
but as a recent report on their methods by
Greater Manchester police shows, they
messed it up with panache, appointing unqualified detectives, losing evidence and
failing to interview witnesses4. The RMP
concluded that no one had done anything
wrong, that 20 Iraqi corpses and nine live
captives were brought to the camp and all
were released without further injury. The
Ministry of Defence has stuck to that line
like a holy creed.

The RMP
concluded that
no one had done
anything wrong,
that 20 Iraqi
corpses and nine
live captives were
brought to the
camp and all were
released without
further injury

This isn’t Kenya
Reading the High Court judgement, you
have to pinch yourself and remember that
this isn’t Kenya under Daniel arap Moi, but
good old Blighty, where the police are impartial, the civil service disinterested and a
minister’s word is his bond. In a civilised
country at least half a dozen senior officials
would now be charged with perjury, the
November 2009 | TheReader 41

Torturing Truth
Thanks to an
apparently
botched
investigation and
an army coverup, only one
soldier has been
convicted of any
crime in relation
to his killing,
and that was
merely inhumane
treatment, for
which he was
jailed for one year

secretary of state for defence would be facing impeachment hearings and a number
of soldiers would be on trial for torture and
murder. But in the United Kingdom, where
we see only what we choose, the judgement sinks without a ripple. We carry on
believing what we have always been told:
that unlike other countries, we do things
properly here.
The judges found that civil servants
working for the Treasury Solicitor had repeatedly lied to the court, claiming that
there were no further documents to disclose
which might have cast light on the case.
They found that the defence secretary, Bob
Ainsworth, “consistently and repeatedly
failed to comply” with the obligation to
disclose the documents the claimants were
seeking. He also slapped a Public Interest
Immunity (PII) certificate on some of the
evidence, preventing it from being revealed
to the court. It turns out that he signed this
certificate “on a partly false basis”, seeking to suppress facts that were already in
the public domain. This abuse, the judges
say, has caused the PII process “potentially
very serious damage”. Ainsworth’s lack of
candour about the evidence meant that he
had wasted “the whole of the cost of these
proceedings”.
But the judges were harshest about
the Royal Military Police. They found that
“the RMP investigation in 2004/5 was not
thorough and proficient”. It was blocked
for five weeks, its procedures were risible,
and none of the nine surviving captives was
interviewed. Worse was the quality of the
evidence presented to the court by Colonel
Dudley Giles, who is the deputy head of
the military police and was the secretary of
state’s principal witness. Giles, they found,

“was overall a most unsatisfactory witness”. The excuse he gave for not disclosing
key evidence was “wholly without foundation”, “we are all firmly of the view that he
lacked the necessary objectivity, proficiency
and reliability”. They suggested that if ever
he was presented as a witness for similar
purposes again, the court “should approach
his evidence with the greatest caution.”
Most important was what the judges
found in some of the documents they eventually prised from the grubby hands of the
state. They were, the court found, “consistent with the contention that more than
nine live detainees” had been taken to the
camp. As only nine came out alive, these
papers support the claimants’ contention
that prisoners were killed there. No wonder the government pretended that the
documents didn’t exist.
Support victims
At the Labour party conference last month,
the home secretary rightly observed that
“social justice means nothing without criminal justice … We need to support victims
and subject perpetrators to the full range
of enforcement powers”5. But this admirable principle does not extend to military
justice, where the army, the military police
and the government collude to prevent
torturers and murderers from being tried.
Friday’s judgement relates to one of several cases of alleged British war crimes in
Iraq. Just one - that of the hotel receptionist Baha Mousa who was beaten to death
by British soldiers - has so far resulted in
a conviction6. Thanks to an apparently
botched investigation and an army coverup, only one soldier has been convicted of
any crime in relation to his killing, and that

Read the best of tom engelhardt
http://coldtype.net/tom.html

42 TheReader | November 2009

Torturing Truth
was merely inhumane treatment, for which
he was jailed for one year7.
Even when soldiers appear to murder
people on their own side, the cases are
passed to the specialist investigations division of the Keystone Cops. Of the four
young recruits who died in suspicious circumstances at the Deepcut training barracks, one had been shot with a bullet to
each side of his head and another had five
bullet wounds in his chest: the ballistics
expert sent to the barracks maintains that
four of them were fired from a distance
and one at close range8,9. After the army
destroyed crucial evidence, Surrey police
decided that all four had taken their own
lives. The ghost of Dr Ouko hovers into
view again.
One of the tests of a functioning democracy is the extent to which its public
servants are subject to the same laws as
everyone else. By this measure the United
Kingdom is a failed state. When the army
is in the dock, Justice swaps her crown for a
bandana, her sword for a Kalashnikov and
her blindfold for a pair of dark glasses. The
state has tried to cover up the crimes of the
armed forces since the Peterloo massacre
and long before. Surely in 2009 it can do

When the army
is in the dock,
Justice swaps
her crown for
a bandana, her
sword for a
Kalashnikov and
her blindfold for
a pair of dark
glasses

George Monbiot’s latest book is Bring On
The Apocalypse

The crime of our time
Was the Economic
Collapse “Indeed,
Criminal?”
The new book by

Danny
Schechter
The News Dissector

“This book is truly revelatory and must
reading for anyone trying to understand
the financial currents that have run the
economy into the ditch.” – Robert W.
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http://www.plunderthecrimeofourtime.com
November 2009 | TheReader 43

Into The Quagmire

Kipling haunts
Obama’s Afghan war
Ray McGovern goes to a meeting in Washington, where
he discovers that some things just don’t seem to change

There was a
certain
poetic justice that
President Carter’s
national security
adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who
has chaired
RAND’s Middle
East Advisory
Board, was chosen
to keynote the
proceedings

T

he White Man’s Burden, a phrase
immortalized by English poet Rudyard Kipling as an excuse for
European-American imperialism,
was front and center on the morning of October 29 at a RAND-sponsored discussion
of Afghanistan in the Russell Senate Office
Building.
The agenda was top-heavy with RAND
speakers, and the thinking was decidedly
“inside the box” – so much so, that I found
myself repeating a verse from Kipling, who
also recognized the dangers of imperialism,
to remind me of the real world:
It is not wise for the Christian white
To hustle the Asian brown;
For the Christian riles
And the Asian smiles
And weareth the Christian down.
At the end of the fight
Lies a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;
And the epitaph drear,
A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East
With a few notable exceptions, the
RAND event offered conventional wisdom
to a fare-thee-well. There was a certain
poetic justice that President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has chaired RAND’s Middle East

44 TheReader | November 2009

Advisory Board, was chosen to keynote the
proceedings.
As national security adviser under President Carter, Brzezinski thought it a good
idea to mousetrap the Soviets into their
own Vietnam debacle by baiting them
into invading Afghanistan in 1979, the war
which was the precursor to the great-power Afghan quagmire three decades later.
At this discussion, however, Brzezinski
disclosed that he had advised the Bush/
Cheney administration to invade Afghanistan in 2001, but insisted that he told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the
US military should not stay “as an alien
force” once American objectives were
achieved.
Exuding his customary confidence,
Brzezinski first addressed – and ruled out
– several “No’s,” the things that the US
must not do:
– Withdrawal is “not in the range of
policy options.”
The US must not repeat the Soviet experience in going it alone, but rather must
“use all our leverage” to make NATO’s
commitment stick.
–The US should not neglect the need to
include “Islamic” groups in the coalition.
Brzezinski offered a much longer litany
of “Yeses” – but his list was disappointingly bereft of new ideas. Indeed, it was
notable only for his insistence that the US

Into The Quagmire
ought to be more actively engaged in promoting a north-south pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean.
He said, for example, that India needs
access to the resources of central Asia, an
area especially rich in natural gas.
Without batting an eye, Brzezinski
noted that within three months the war
in Afghanistan will be the “longest war in
US history,” and warned that the United
States could be “bogged down there for
another decade or so.”
At the same time, he argued, the world
impact of an early US departure “would be
utterly devastating.” Quagmire, anyone?
Questioned about growing opposition
to the war, he conceded condescendingly
that “public fatigue” is understandable,
but expressed confidence that adoption of
his recommended policies would be “persuasive” enough to turn public opinion
around.
One must give RAND credit for inviting
a few outsiders whose remarks came closer
to reflecting reality.
Former national intelligence officer for
the Middle East, Paul Pillar, and Harvard
professor Stephen Walt offered observations that, though eminently sensible,
somehow seemed oddly out of step.
Pillar asked if what the US was doing
in Afghanistan is enhancing the security of
the American people. Are the costs justified, given the amount of change and the
“direction of change” in the area that can
be realistically expected, he asked?
Even if the US and NATO effort is, as
they say, “properly resourced,” large parts
of Afghanistan will remain open to the
Taliban, and perhaps al Qaeda – not to
mention alternative locales like Somalia
and Yemen.
And then there are the counterproductive consequences.
It is a given, said Pillar, that sending
more troops perceived as occupation forces
will – more than any other step – bring
more and more recruits to the Taliban. As
for the cost, Pillar cited the recent congres-

sional testimony by Stephen Biddle, a defense policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Biddle, though supportive of Gen. Stanley Chrystal’s counterinsurgency approach,
said it would incur “Iraq-war-scale cost for
three to five years.”
Pillar asked if that kind of anticipated
cost was worth what he suggested would
be “at best, a slight reduction in the danger
from terrorism.” This, he said, is the calculation that the President has to make.

Al Qaeda will
have a safe haven
– in Pakistan,
Somalia, Yemen,
even Europe – no
matter the degree
of “success” that
the US achieves in
Afghanistan

No Alternative?
Stephen Walt picked up on Pillar’s themes,
pleading for a realistic assessment of benefits against cost. As for US troop casualties,
850 have already been killed. At a rate of
50 deaths a month, five more years would
bring 3,000 dead – not to mention the
many thousands more wounded.
And the longer the United States stays,
the more it looks like a foreign occupier
and the more various Afghan factions are
pushed together by giving them a common
enemy. Plus, al Qaeda will have a safe haven – in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, even
Europe – no matter the degree of “success” that the US achieves in Afghanistan.
Walt opined that it is the epitome of hubris for the US to take on the monumental
task of “social engineering” the 200 million
people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and
that the chances of succeeding are “not
great.”
Walt also questioned the disproportionate attention in resources directed toward
Afghanistan when there is little reason to
send more US troops there, except that
there are already US troops there.
Moreover, Walt pointed to a particularly
significant “opportunity cost” in the drain
on President Barack Obama’s time, noting
there are lots of other problems – domestic as well as foreign – that crave his attention.
Remarkably, among virtually all the
speakers there was broad consensus that
Brzezinski’s first No-No would prevail –
November 2009 | TheReader 45

Into The Quagmire
Anyways, Obama
grew up and went
to Harvard, which
is a big college
somewhere
near Maine or
Connecticut
or one of those
teeny-tiny states
that nobody can
remember on a
geography quiz –
or at least nobody
in my class could
remember the
capital of except,
of course, Anne
Marie Smith

that is, that no US troop withdrawal is in
the cards.
Walt put it bluntly, saying the President
“painted himself into a corner” last spring
and would probably not be able to solve
“one of the world’s most intractable problems.”
The Harvard professor predicted that in
just a few years the Obama administration
will look back with huge regret on how
badly it erred.
The Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble
took strong issue with the notion that “a
country like ours would have no alternative” to escalation. He, too, asked if adding
to the US presence in Afghanistan is essential to US national security.
Or, Preble wondered, has the conflict
there simply become an interest in itself –
“that we must win this war because it is
the war we are in.” He, too, gave US policy
makers a failing grade on “the cost-benefit
test.”
RAND and the Establishment
The biggest surprise for me came in the
remarks of well-respected diplomat James
Dobbins, director of RAND’s International
Security and Defense Policy Center. Dobbins provided no supporting data or reasoning to support what seemed – to me,
at least – to be scare tactics.
Addressing the possibility of US departure from Afghanistan, Dobbins predicted
a long list of calamities: civil war (as if one
isn’t already underway), the involvement
not only of Pakistan but of Iran, Russia and
China; millions of refugees, widespread disease, negative economic growth, increased
extremism and use of Afghanistan for more
terrorism.
As for the administration’s public posture, Dobbins pointed to a need to “expand the explanation for our presence in
Afghanistan,” so that the rationale will appear more commensurate with an increasing commitment” – read, more troops justified by more rhetorical flourishes.
While Dobbins performed yeoman ser-

46 TheReader | November 2009

vice in securing, for example, Iranian cooperation in originally setting up the Karzai
government in Kabul, his experience with
Asian insurgencies is paper-thin.
I was painfully reminded of this by his
gratuitous remark that “in Vietnam we had
neutralized the Viet Cong” and only when
the North Vietnamese came into the fray,
and the US commitment slackened, did we
lose that one.
With that faux history as background,
it is less surprising that Dobbins would
tout, as he did, the “Powell doctrine” of
overwhelming force and advocate for a still
deeper US commitment in Afghanistan, to
be accompanied by a more persuasive rationale to explain it.
Walt pointed out that, applying the insurgent-to-population ratio Dobbins has
used for Bosnia, 600,000 troops would be
needed to defeat the insurgents in Afghanistan.
RAND veteran and former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad,
addressed the public perception problem
regarding the Afghan war with unusual
candor: “People don’t believe we know
what we’re doing.”
Still, endorsing the Brzezinski No-No
dictum, Khalilzad said that “no serious
person” would contemplate US withdrawal
enabling “extremism” to prevail.
Khalilzad argued for playing to the US
strength with a “purchasing power” approach – the United States comes up with
the money to pay potential or actual insurgents more than they make fighting for the
Taliban. Otherwise, he said the US needed
to expand Afghan forces.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Michigan, also stressed
the need for building up Afghan forces, as
the administration considers increasing the
US troop presence in Afghanistan. Levin
spoke of the need for a 400,000-strong Afghan army and police force by 2012, trained
by US and NATO specialists.
I am reminded of what former CENTCOM commander, General John Abizaid,

Into The Quagmire
described to the Senate Armed Services
Committee three years ago as a “major
change” in the Iraq war – namely, new
emphasis on training Iraqis.
The final returns are not yet in for Iraq,
but in my experience this is almost always an unfruitful exercise, as many of us
learned from Vietnam. Been there; done
that; should have known that.
Three months after John Kennedy’s
death, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent President Lyndon Johnson a
draft of a major speech McNamara planned
to give on defense policy. What follows is a
segment of an audiotape of a conversation
between the two on Feb. 25, 1964:
Johnson: Your speech is good, but I wonder if you shouldn’t find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.
McNamara: The problem is what to say
about it.
Johnson: I’ll tell you what to say about it.
I would say we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. We could pull out there;
the dominoes would fall and that part of the
world would go to the Communists. … Nobody really understands what is out there. …
Our purpose is to train [the South Vietnamese] people, and our training’s going good.
McNamara: All right, sir.
But the Vietnamese training wasn’t “going good.” Before long, half a million American troops were in Vietnam trying to save
South Vietnam’s government.
Almost always, it is a forlorn hope that
unwelcome occupation troops can train indigenous soldiers and police to fight against
their own brothers and sisters. That the
British also seem to have forgotten these
lessons, along with some of Kipling’s cautionary poetry about the risks of imperialism, is really no excuse.
If President Obama is depending on the
RAND folks and embedded neo-con pundits like the Washington Post’s David Ignatius (his column the day after the discussion appeals for more troops “to continue
the mission,” as the President and his advisers attempt to figure out what the mis-

sion should be), we are in trouble.
As I sat at the RAND event, I could not
help wondering what would be the judgments of my former colleagues in the intelligence community on these key issues?
Specifically, what might a National Intelligence Estimate on Prospects for Afghanistan say?
NIEs are the most authoritative genre
of analytical product, embodying key judgments on important national security issues. They are coordinated throughout
the 16-agency intelligence community and
then signed by the Director of National Intelligence in his statutory capacity as chief
intelligence adviser to the President.
An NIE can, and should, play an important role.
An estimate on Iran’s nuclear program,
given to President George W. Bush in November 2007, helped derail plans by Vice
President Dick Cheney and White House
adviser Elliott Abrams for war on Iran.
The most senior US military officers had
realized what a debacle that would be and
insisted that this NIE’s key judgments be
made public.
They expected, rightly, that public
knowledge that Iran had stopped working
on developing a nuclear warhead in 2003
would take the wind out of Cheney’s sails.
Bush and Cheney were not pleased; but
the NIE helped stop the juggernaut toward
war with Iran.

Almost always, it
is a forlorn hope
that unwelcome
occupation
troops can train
indigenous soldiers
and police to
fight against their
own brothers
and sisters. That
the British also
seem to have
forgotten these
lessons, along with
some of Kipling’s
cautionary poetry
about the risks
of imperialism, is
really no excuse

There’s Always an NIE, Right?
As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the Sixties and Seventies,
I worked on several of the NIEs produced
before and during the war. All too many
bore this title: “Probable Reactions to
Various Courses of Action With Respect to
North Vietnam.”
Typical of the kinds of question the President and his advisers wanted addressed:
Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by
bombing it? If the US were to introduce
x thousand additional troops into South
Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about
November 2009 | TheReader 47

Into The Quagmire
After several
months of
exhaustive
analysis, Adams
had connected a
whole bunch of
dots, so to speak,
and concluded that
there were more
than twice as
many Vietnamese
Communists under
arms as the Army
had on its books

xx thousand?
Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being
“good team players.” But in those days we
labored under a strong ethos dictating that
we give it to policymakers straight, without
fear or favor.
We had career protection for doing that.
And – truth be told – we often took a
perverse delight in it.
Our judgments (the unwelcome ones,
anyway) were pooh-poohed as negativism;
and policymakers, of course, were in no
way obliged to take them into account. The
point is that they continued to be sought.
Not even Lyndon Johnson, nor Richard
Nixon, would be likely to decide on a significant escalation without seeking the best
guess of the intelligence community as to
how US adversaries would likely react to
this or that escalatory step.
Yet, would you believe there is no current National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan? Rather, Generals David Petraeus and Stanley Chrystal are running the
show, allowing professional intelligence
analysts to be mostly straphangers at planning and strategy meetings.
CIA Director Panetta, a self-described
“creature of Congress,” is not going to risk
putting any senior military noses out of
joint by objecting, and neither is his nominal boss, Director of National Intelligence
Dennis Blair.
And, sad to say, National Security Adviser James Jones, in deferring to the military, is serving President Obama just as
poorly as Bush apparatchik Condoleezza
Rice served President Bush.
How many “militants” are there in Afghanistan? How may “insurgents?” How
do you draw a distinction between a militant and an insurgent? Might these combatants be considered, in many areas of Afghanistan, resistance fighters? What would
be the implications of that?
Forty-two years ago, my CIA analyst
colleague Sam Adams was sent to Saigon
to have it out with the Army intelligence

48 TheReader | November 2009

unit there.
After several months of exhaustive analysis, Adams had connected a whole bunch
of dots, so to speak, and concluded that
there were more than twice as many Vietnamese Communists under arms as the
Army had on its books.
Bewildered at first, Adams quickly
learned that Westmoreland had instructed
his intelligence staff to falsify intelligence
on enemy strength, keeping the numbers
low enough to promote an illusion of progress in the war.
After a prolonged knock-down-drag-out
fight, then-CIA Director Richard Helms decided to acquiesce in the Army’s arbitrary
exclusion from its enemy aggregate total
paramilitary and other armed elements
numbering up to 300,000.
These categories had been included in
previous estimates because they were a key
part of the combat force of the Communists. The Adams/CIA best estimate was
total Communist strength of 500,000.
However, the doctored estimate went to
the President and his advisers in November 1967, just two months before the countrywide Communist offensive at Tet in late
January/early February 1968 proved – at
great cost – that Adams figures were far
more accurate than the Army’s.
Day in court
Years later, when Adams and CBS told the
story of this internal battle on “60 Minutes,”
Westmoreland sued, giving Adams his day
in court, literally. Subpoenaed documents
and the testimony of Westmoreland’s own
staff in Saigon established the accuracy of
Adams’ charges, and Westmoreland withdrew his suit.
Yet, right up until his premature death at
age 55, Sam Adams could not dispel the remorse he felt at not having gone public with
his findings much earlier. He felt that, had
he done so, the entire left half of the Vietnam memorial would not be there, because
there would be no names to carve into the
granite for those later years of the war.

Into The Quagmire
In recent years, former Defense Department and RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg also
has expressed deep regret that he waited
too long; that he did not give the press the
“Pentagon Papers” history of the Vietnam
War and its many deceptions until 1971.
But it’s important to note that some
patriotic truth-tellers, including Ellsberg,
did reveal key facts about the war in the
late Sixties, as the Johnson administration
worked on plans to expand the ground war
into Cambodia, Laos and right up to the
Chinese border – perhaps even beyond.
In 1967, the beribboned, bemedaled Petraeus – sorry, I mean Westmoreland –
addressed a joint session of Congress during which he congratulated himself on the
“great progress” being made in the war.
What Congress did not know was that
Westmoreland was on the verge of getting President Johnson to agree to sending
206,000 more troops for a widening of the
war that threatened to bring China in as an
active combatant.
But two key leaks to the New York Times
helped put the kibosh on that escalation.
The first leak revealed the 206,000 escalation figure and the second – by Ellsberg
himself – disclosed the suppression of the
CIA’s higher count of Vietnamese Communists under arms.
On March 25, 1968, Johnson complained
to a small gathering of confidants: “The
leaks to the New York Times hurt us. … We
have no support for the war. … I would
have given Westy the 206,000 men.”
I believe President Obama wants to
make the right decision regarding Afghanistan. For me, his poignant visit to the US
Air Force Base at Dover, Delaware, to receive the coffins of 18 Americans recently
killed in Afghanistan tells me something of
his authenticity and determination to do
this one right.
But he is under great military and political pressure to send more troops on what
I believe is a fool’s errand. And his national security adviser and intelligence chiefs
have, well, chickened out.

The Vietnam Analogy
One clear lesson is that patriotic truth-telling can prevent wider wars. And so I address this to my erstwhile colleagues and
newer analysts in the intelligence community: Those of you working on Afghanistan
and Pakistan have your own educated estimates of the prospects for success of various US courses of action. Wait no longer
to be asked to write a National Intelligence
Estimate.
The President should not be deprived of
your views.
Perhaps it was serendipity (or maybe
a reward for sitting through the RAND
event) but that evening I was privileged to
attend the Washington premier of an excellent documentary on Dan Ellsberg – The
Most Dangerous Man in America – the sobriquet he earned from Henry Kissinger
when Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to
the New York Times.
The film contained hard-to-watch footage of the war that took the lives of twoto-three million Vietnamese and 58,000
Americans. But I was happy to see that
the film did pick up, from Ellsberg’s book
Secrets, his decision to begin revealing
important facts to the New York Times in
early 1968, a move that helped prevent a
still more dangerous escalation of the war
in Vietnam and its widening to adjacent
countries.
Think about it, intelligence analysts.
Don’t just look at each other. Think more
about all those young people from the inner city and towns of less than 10,000 forming the pool from which a de facto poverty
draft sends the bulk of US troops off to bear
the modern White Man’s Burden.
That is not the America that so many of
us believe in. Do something to stop it. CT

What Congress
did not know
was that
Westmoreland was
on the verge of
getting President
Johnson to agree
to sending 206,000
more troops
for a widening
of the war that
threatened to
bring China in
as an active
combatant

Ray McGovern was an Army infantry/
intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst
for almost 30 years. He is cofounder of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
November 2009 | TheReader 49

Flight Of Shame

And still the
torture continues

Barack Obama promised to end the practice of kidnapping
people and flying them off to torture, so why is it still happening?,
asks Sherwood Ross

Azar alleged he
was shackled to
an office chair for
seven hours, put
in an unheated
metal shipping
container and
given only a thin
blanket despite
near freezing
temperature,
denied sleep
and food for 30
hours, had his
ears covered
by earphones
and blindfolded
during his plane
ride from Kabul,
Afghanistan,
to the US

E

ven though Barack Obama, the
candidate, pledged to end “the
practice of shipping away prisoners
in the dead of night to be tortured
in far-off countries,” his FBI has been rendering kidnap victims to the US The practice is still kidnapping, however; and it’s
still illegal.
Unlucky victim No. 1 was Raymond Azar,
45, flown from Afghanistan to Alexandria,
Va., not to a foreign country. The construction manager for Sima International, a
Lebanese outfit that did work for the US
military, Azar said he was tortured by his
abductors. He might just as well have been
flow to Egypt under the Bushies.
Interestingly, Azar was never charged as
a dangerous terrorist, only with conspiracy
to commit bribery for wiring $106,000 in
kickbacks to a US employee’s bank account
in hopes of getting $13 million in unpaid
bills okayed.
For this comparatively trivial white
collar crime, Azar’s lawyers said when arrested he was stripped naked, hooded, and
subjected to a body cavity search. What’s
more, according to an article by Scott Horton, writing at Common Dreams, Azar
claims a federal agent showed Azar a photo
of his wife and four children and told him
to confess or else he might “never see them
again.” Azar confessed, and pled guilty to
conspiracy to commit bribery.

50 TheReader | November 2009

Azar alleged he was shackled to an
office chair for seven hours, put in an unheated metal shipping container and given
only a thin blanket despite near freezing
temperature, denied sleep and food for 30
hours, had his ears covered by earphones
and blindfolded during his plane ride from
Kabul, Afghanistan, to the US, Horton reported. Court records indicate Azar was
shackled at the ankles, waist, and wrists.
“These procedures – particularly the
blindfolding and shackling – correspond to
standard Bush-era enhanced interrogation
techniques, which President Obama declared banned immediately on his arrival in
office,” Horton noted.
Flak jackets
The arrest of this manager was made by no
fewer than 10 men wearing flak jackets and
carrying military style assault weapons, according to legal papers filed by Azar’s lawyers. Maybe they expected him to be toting
a wrecking ball.
“Bizarre,” is how Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch described the rendition.
“He was treated like a high-security terrorist instead of someone accused of a relatively minor white-collar crime,” she told
the Los Angeles Times on August 22.
Removing Azar from Afghanistan would
only be legal with approval of that government but Interior Ministry officials there

Flight Of Shame
said no such approval was requested by
the US.
International law professor Philippe
Sands of London University is quoted
by Horton as terming Azar’s allegations
“deeply troubling” in that they indicate
“clear violations of international norms on
due process and detainee treatment.”
Under “extraordinary rendition,” alleged terror suspects in the past have been
abducted by the CIA and flown to be tortured (and/or murdered) to Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan and Uzbekistan, among other venues. The practice was started in 1996 under President
Bill Clinton, who is said to have rendered
80 suspects, and was vastly expanded by
President George W. Bush after 9/11.
Torture violation
Rendition on its face is a violation of Article 3 of the United Nations Convention
Against Torture, ratified by the US in 1994.
As Wikipedia notes, “Rendered suspects
are denied due process because they are
arrested without charges and deprived of
legal counsel.”

During his appearance before the Senate
Intelligence Committee last February, CIA
nominee Leon Panetta, now Agency Director, said, “I think renditions where we return individuals to another country where
they prosecute them under their laws, I
think that is an appropriate use of rendition,” the Associated Press reported.
Obama’s aides have said they will count
on the diplomatic assurances of the other
countries not to torture suspects. Amrit
Singh, a lawyer with the American Civil
Liberties Union, said such assurances have
“proven completely ineffective in preventing torture.”
With some modifications, the Obama administration appears to be carrying forward
the ugly practices of the Bush and Clinton
imperial presidencies, hardly the “change”
for which the American people had hoped.
Unless you count “chump change.” CT

With some
modifications,
the Obama
administration
appears to be
carrying forward
the ugly practices
of the Bush and
Clinton imperial
presidencies,
hardly the
“change” for which
the American
people had hoped

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public
relations consultant who formerly reported
for the Chicago Daily News and wire
services. Contact him at sherwoodross10@
gmail.com

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November 2009 | TheReader 51

Troubled Economy

Propping up
a broken Capitalism

Shamus Cooke says that any entity that seriously affects the general
public should be owned by the public, not by private interests

Our economic
system is
dominated by
a tiny crust
of super-rich
individuals, bailing
themselves out
with taxpayer
money while
playing deaf
to an exploding
social crisis

F

ive years ago it would be unthinkable that a harsh critique of capitalism would attract a mass audience.
But this is exactly what Michael
Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love
Story, has done. The source of Moore’s success is his willingness to focus on what the
media ignores: the human faces behind
unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosures,
evictions, etc., and the faces benefiting
from this misery – the corporate-elite sitting atop the financial system.
This reality has quickly educated millions of Americans, who now understand
that our economic system is dominated by
a tiny crust of super-rich individuals, bailing themselves out with taxpayer money
while playing deaf to an exploding social
crisis.
To combat these truths, the corporateelite are planning a pro-capitalist media
blitz.
The US Chamber of Commerce is an
organization where the biggest US corporations come together to chat, organize,
and throw money at politicians. Now, they
are launching their “dream big” campaign,
with the aim of “…preserving and advancing the American free enterprise system
[capitalism].”
This $100 million campaign – as explained on the Chamber’s website – will
focus on “national advertising,” “grassroots

52 TheReader | November 2009

advocacy,” “research and ideas leadership”
[think tanks and universities], and “Citizen, Community, and Youth Engagement”
– combining “…outreach to governors,
mayors, and young audiences…” with “…
online social networking” (Facebook).
Aside from saving capitalism, the campaign aims to save “… the 7 million jobs
lost to the current recession and create the
13 million new jobs that will be needed over
the next decade.”
But as Albert Einstein pointed out, “no
problem can be solved from the same level
of consciousness that created it.” No serious economist is predicting that the economy is going to start pumping out jobs, let
alone 20 million of them.
Praise singers
The Chamber of Commerce isn’t the only
entity trying to shore up the profit system.
Corporate-oriented pundits and politicians
are falling over themselves to sing high
praises to our troubled economic system.
Bush gave such a speech shortly after the
system crashed, where he admitted that
people were beginning to equate the market economy [capitalism] with “…greed,
exploitation, and failure.” This was wrong,
Bush claimed. Instead, regulation was the
culprit, a simple, easy-to-fix problem. The
giant banks and other mega-corporations
– owned and controlled by tiny groups of

Troubled Economy
ultrarich individuals – could remain in
place.
Another rescuer of capitalism is Newsweek Editor and savvy politician, Fareed
Zakaria, who wrote a Newsweek article
entitled, The Capitalist Manifesto. In it, Zakaria explains, “What we are experiencing
is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of
finance, of democracy, of globalization and
ultimately of ethics.” To further obscure the
problem, he concludes that the banks and
corporations are not to blame… everybody
is: “… there is enough blame to go around
and many fixes to make…But at heart,
there needs to be a deeper fix within all of
us, a simple gut check. If it doesn’t feel right,
we shouldn’t be doing it.” (June 13, 2009).
Of course not every defense of capitalism is as ridiculous as Bush’s or Zakaria’s.
A more nuanced approach can be heard by
both Ariana Huffington and Ron Paul, who
both share the same perspective: capitalism did not fail because capitalism did not
exist – “corporatism” did.
Corporate domination
Assuming that Paul and Huffington are
defining “corporatism” as an economy
dominated by large banks and other corporations, they’re right. They’re wrong to
think that “corporatism” and capitalism
are mutually exclusive. In fact, capitalism
has been dominated by large corporations
for over a hundred years, with the advent
of the “robber barons” – monopoly corporation owners like Rockefeller, Morgan,
Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc.
At its foundation, however, capitalism
hasn’t changed. The system has always
produced goods for the purpose of private
profit, not people’s need, and the people
who profit from capitalism have always

been those who own the wealth, machines
and buildings that produce these goods,
whether they be cars, computers, or loans.
Although capitalism’s essence remains
intact, its appearance has morphed over
the years. In the early days, small businesses dominated, alongside small banks.
But as transportation and technology developed, the world seemed to get smaller,
while more and more goods were being
produced.
This created the conditions that led to
a capitalist free for all; a relentless battle
to out-sell the others on the global marketplace. The big dogs ate the little dogs, and
became bigger and bigger dogs – supercorporations that now span the globe, with
gigantic facilities producing unimaginable
amounts of commodities.
This is the world we live in today. These
companies wield absolute power over political and social life: their tremendous wealth
enables them to purchase politicians and
army generals, while keeping certain topics
in Congress “off the table.” This is the reality of capitalism as it exists today, a fact that
must be acknowledged by anybody offering
a credible solution.
We cannot regulate capitalism to meet
our needs when we do not control the system; those who own the banks and corporations do. Real social change will require
that this dynamic be smashed, so that
socially precious institutions are not the
property of any individual or small group.
Any entity that seriously affects the general
public should be run in the interest of the
public, and thus owned by no one. CT

These companies
wield absolute
power over
political and
social life: their
tremendous
wealth enables
them to purchase
politicians and
army generals,
while keeping
certain topics
in Congress
“off the table”

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker,
trade unionist, and writer for Workers
Action – www.workerscompass.org

Read the best of joe bageant
http://www.coldtype.net/joe.html

November 2009 | TheReader 53

Straight Dope

Five things the media’s
hiding about cannabis
Paul Armentano on a few things you won’t read about
in your local newspapers or see on the TV news

So, is there any
truth to the claim
that pot smoking
is sparking a
dramatic rise in
mental illness?

W

riting in the journal Science
nearly four decades ago,
New York State University
sociologist Erich Goode documented the media’s complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition.
He observed: “[T]ests and experiments
purporting to demonstrate the ravages of
marijuana consumption receive enormous
attention from the media, and their findings
become accepted as fact by the public. But
when careful refutations of such research
are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings,
they tend to be ignored or dismissed.”
A glimpse of today’s mainstream media
landscape indicates that little has changed
– with news outlets continuing to, at best,
underreport the publication of scientific
studies that undermine the federal government’s longstanding pot propaganda and,
at worst, ignore them all together.
Here are five recent stories the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know
about pot:
1. Marijuana Use Is Not Associated With
a Rise in Incidences of Schizophrenia
Over the past few years, the worldwide
media, as well as federal officials in the
United Kingdom, Canada and the US have
earnestly promoted the notion that smoking pot induces mental illness.

54 TheReader | November 2009

Perhaps most notably, in 2007 the MSM
reported that cannabis “could boost the
risk of developing a psychotic illness later
in life by about 40 percent” – a talking
point that was also actively promoted by
US anti-drug officials.
So, is there any truth to the claim that
pot smoking is sparking a dramatic rise in
mental illness? Not at all, according to the
findings of a study published in July in the
journal Schizophrenia Research.
Investigators at the Keele University
Medical School in Britain compared trends
in marijuana use and incidences of schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996
to 2005. Researchers reported that the
“incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or
declining” during this period, even the use
of cannabis among the general population
was rising.
“[T]he expected rise in diagnoses of
schizophrenia and psychoses did not occur
over a 10-year period,” the authors concluded. “This study does not therefore support
the specific causal link between cannabis
use and incidence of psychotic disorders.
… This concurs with other reports indicating that increases in population cannabis
use have not been followed by increases in
psychotic incidence.”
As of this writing, a handful of news
wire reports in Australia, Canada, and the

Straight Dope
U.K. have reported on the Keele University
study. Notably, no American media outlets
covered the story.
2. Marijuana Smoke Doesn’t Damage the
Lungs Like Tobacco
Everyone knows that smoking pot is as
damaging, if not more damaging, to the
lungs than puffing cigarettes, right?
Wrong, according to a team of New Zealand investigators writing in the European
Respiratory Journal in August.
Researchers at the University of Otago
in New Zealand compared the effects of
cannabis and tobacco smoke on lung function in over 1,000 adults.
They reported: “Cumulative cannabis
use was associated with higher forced vital
capacity [the volume of air that can forcibly
be blown out after full inspiration], total
lung capacity, functional residual capacity
[the volume of air present in the lungs at
the end of passive expiration] and residual
volume.
“Cannabis was also associated with
higher airways resistance but not with
forced expiratory volume in one second
[the maximum volume of air that can be
forcibly blown out in the first second during the FVC test], forced expiratory ratio, or
transfer factor. These findings were similar
amongst those who did not smoke tobacco.
… By contrast, tobacco use was associated
with lower forced expiratory volume in one
second, lower forced expiratory ratio, lower
transfer factor and higher static lung volumes, but not with airways resistance.”
They concluded, “Cannabis appears to
have different effects on lung function to
those of tobacco.”
Predictably, the scientists’ “inconvenient
truth” was not reported in a single media
outlet.
3. Cannabis Use Potentially Protects,
Rather Than Harms, the Brain
Does smoking pot kill brain cells? Drinking
alcohol most certainly does, and many opponents of marijuana-law reform claim that

marijuana’s adverse effects on the brain are
even worse. Are they correct?
Not according to recent findings published this summer in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.
Investigators at the University of California at San Diego examined white matter integrity in adolescents with histories
of binge drinking and marijuana use. They
reported that binge drinkers (defined as
boys who consumed five or more drinks in
one sitting, or girls who consumed four or
more drinks at one time) showed signs of
white matter damage in eight regions of
the brain.
By contrast, the binge drinkers who also
used marijuana experienced less damage in
seven out of the eight brain regions.
“Binge drinkers who also use marijuana
did not show as consistent a divergence
from non-users as did the binge drink-only
group,” authors concluded. “[It is] possible
that marijuana may have some neuroprotective properties in mitigating alcoholrelated oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell
death.”
To date, only a handful of US media outlets – almost exclusively college newspapers – have reported the story.

Recent research
is emerging that
indicates that pot
may also suppress
one’s desire to
use so-called hard
drugs

4. Marijuana Is a Terminus, Not a
‘Gateway,’ to Hard Drug Use
Alarmist claims that experimenting with
cannabis will inevitably lead to the use of
other illicit drugs persist in the media despite statistical data indicating that the
overwhelming majority of those who try
pot never go on to use cocaine or heroin.
Moreover, recent research is emerging
that indicates that pot may also suppress
one’s desire to use so-called hard drugs.
In June, Paris researchers writing in the
journal Neuropsychopharmacology concluded that the administration of oral THC in
animals suppressed sensitivity to opiate
dependence.
Also this summer, investigators at the
New York State Psychiatric Institute reported in the American Journal on AddicNovember 2009 | TheReader 55

Straight Dope
“This negative
impact of
marijuana scenes
is not reversed in
the presence of
strong
anti-marijuana
arguments in the
ads and is mainly
present for the
group
of adolescents
who are often
targets of such
anti-marijuana
ads (i.e.,
high-risk
adolescents),”

tions that drug-treatment subjects who use
cannabis intermittently were more likely
to adhere to treatment for opioid dependence.
Although a press release for the former study
appeared on the Web site physorg.com on July 7,
neither study ever gained any traction in the mainstream media.
5. Government’s Anti-Pot Ads Encourage,
Rather Than Discourage, Marijuana Use
Sure, many of us already knew that the
federal government’s $2 billion ad campaign targeting pot was failing to dissuade
viewers from toking up, but who knew it
was this bad?
According to a new study posted online in the
journal Health Communication, survey data published by investigators at the Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Pennsylvania
found that many of the government’s public-service
announcements actually encouraged pot use.
Researchers assessed the attitudes of over 600
adolescents, age 12 to 18, after viewing 60 government-funded anti-marijuana television spots.
Specifically, researchers evaluated whether the
presence of marijuana-related imagery in the ads

(e.g., the handling of marijuana cigarettes or the
depiction of marijuana-smoking behavior) were
more likely or less likely to discourage viewers’ use
of cannabis.
Messages that depict teens associating with
cannabis are “significantly less effective than others,” the researchers found.
“This negative impact of marijuana scenes is not
reversed in the presence of strong anti-marijuana
arguments in the ads and is mainly present for the
group of adolescents who are often targets of such
anti-marijuana ads (i.e., high-risk adolescents),” the
authors determined. “For this segment of adolescents, including marijuana scenes in anti-marijuana
(public-service announcements) may not be a good
strategy.”
Needless to say, no outlets in the mainstream
media – many of which donated air time to several of the beleaguered ads in question – have yet
to report on the story.
CT
Paul Armentano is the deputy director of
NORML, the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and is the
co-author of the book Marijuana Is Safer:
So Why Are We Driving People to Drink
(2009, Chelsea Green)?

Waging war, winning the
Nobel Prize
William Blum says the Obama administration, like that
of George W. Bush, seems to believe the world is a lawless mess
awaiting the US – the chief warlord – to solve its problems

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers
are punished unless they kill in large numbers
and to the sound of trumpets.” – Voltaire

Q

uestion: How many countries do
you have to be at war with to be
disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged
war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq
and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until
he actually gets the prize.
Somalian civil society and court system
are so devastated from decades of war that
one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have
the means to raise serious legal challenges
to Washington’s apparent belief that it can
drop bombs on that sad land whenever it
appears to serve the empire’s needs. But
a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves
“Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution”, and remembering just enough of their
country’s more civilized past, has filed suit
before the nation’s High Court to make the
federal government stop American drone
attacks on countless innocent civilians.
The group declared that a Pakistan Army
spokesman claimed to have the capability to
shoot down the drones, but the government
had made a policy decision not to. 1
The Obama administration, like the
Bush administration, behaves like the world
is one big lawless Somalia and the United

States is the chief warlord. On October 20
the president again displayed his deep love
of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of
Vietnam at the White House, after earlier
awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit
Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and
conspicuous gallantry”. 2 War correspondent
Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers
in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to
maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” 3
What would it take for the Obamaniacs
to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their
dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his
prize money to build a monument to the
First – “Oh What a Lovely” – World War?
The memorial could bear the inscription:
“Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling
coaxed his young son John into enlisting in
this war. John died his first day in combat.
Kipling later penned these words:
“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

War
correspondent
Michael Herr has
honored Vietnam
soldiers in his own
way: “We took
space back quickly,
expensively, with
total panic and
close to maximum
brutality. Our
machine was
devastating.
And versatile.
It could do
everything but
stop”

“The Constitution supposes what the
history of all governments demonstrates,
that the executive is the branch of power
most interested in war, and most prone to it.
It has accordingly with studied care vested
the question of war in the legislature.” –
November 2009 | TheReader 57

Anti -Empire Report
If machismo
explains war, if
men love war and
fighting so much,
why do we have
to compel them
with conscription
on pain of
imprisonment?
Why do the
powers-that-be
have to wage
advertising
campaigns to
seduce young
people to enlist in
the military?

James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.
A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged
the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people,
international law, or world opinion. Millions
marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama
in the belief that he shared their repugnance
for America’s Wars Without End. They had
no good reason to believe this – Obama’s
campaign was filled with repeated warlike
threats against Iran and Afghanistan – but
they wanted to believe it.
If machismo explains war, if men love
war and fighting so much, why do we have
to compel them with conscription on pain
of imprisonment? Why do the powers-thatbe have to wage advertising campaigns to
seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme
lengths to be declared exempt for physical
or medical reasons? Why do they flee into
exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert
the military in large numbers in the midst
of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland
or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are
many macho men in those countries.
“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet
interesting people, and kill them.”
War licenses men to take part in what
would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.
“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of
war that you have to see somebody up close
and get to know him before you can shoot
him.” – Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H
“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s
always the people who get killed.” – Eduardo Galeano
After the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God
is on our side, and if the world’s people try
to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect
us and help us.” 4
“I trust God speaks through me. Without
that, I couldn’t do my job.” – George W.
Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq. 5

58 TheReader | November 2009

“I believe that Christ died for my sins
and I am redeemed through him. That is a
source of strength and sustenance on a daily
basis.” – Barack Obama. 6
Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same
fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from
abortion clinics?
God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free
trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen
as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.
Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed:
“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn
anew what a farce that prize has become, or
always was. Its recipients include quite a few
individuals who had as much commitment
to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in
the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of
Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the
prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called
upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable
to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the
Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian
bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”
7 There is a word for such a veiled threat
– “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of
the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets
hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind
words and a machine gun will get you more
than kind words alone.”
The continuing desperate quest to find
something good to say about US foreign
policy
Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist
or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable
right, holding high positions in academia

Anti -Empire Report
and in every administration, Republican or
Democrat, members of the highly esteemed
Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua
Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia”
at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and
respectable Washington Post about how
– despite all the scare talk – it wouldn’t
be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned
into another Vietnam because “Vietnam
and the United States have become close
partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading
and strategic relationship and fostering
goodwill between governments, businesses
and people on both sides. … America did
not win the war there, but over time it has
won the peace. … American war veterans
publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate
students and professors] could ensure that
the next generation of Afghan leaders sees
an image of the United States beyond that
of the war.” 8 And so on.
On second thought, this is not so much
right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know
… What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless”.
Just what is the point? Germany and Israel
are on excellent terms … therefore, what
point can we make about the Holocaust?
As to America not winning the war in
Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s
wrong. Most people believe that the United
States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the
water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary
purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a
good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same
reason the United States has been at war
with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that
the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as
good as it would if left in peace.
And in all the years since the Vietnam War
ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering
from diseases and deformities caused by US
sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States

no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official
apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans
– their land and/or their bodies permeated
with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster
bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals – have to look forward to in
Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the US
relationship with Afghanistan eventually
resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes.
God Bless America.
One further thought about Afghanistan:
The suggestion that the United States could,
and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma
by simply getting out of that god-forsaken
place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist
critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace
so bold a step – Who knows what horror
may result? But when the Soviet Union was
in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989)
who in the West insisted that they remain?
For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the
Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not
there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and
gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t
leave Iraq.

The suggestion
that the United
States could, and
should, solve its
(self-created)
dilemma by simply
getting out of
that god-forsaken
place is dismissed
out of hand by
the American
government
and media

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” –
the one they can’t admit to.
“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die
hard,” said US Ambassador to the United
Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before
the General Assembly voted on the annual
resolution to end the US embargo against
Cuba. “The hostile language we have just
heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,”
she continued, “seems straight out of the
Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement
contained not a word about the embargo;
not very conducive to a constructive solution
to the unstated “Cuba problem”, the one
about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the
fear that the socialist virus would spread.
November 2009 | TheReader 59

Anti -Empire Report
The sanctions, in
numerous ways
large and small,
make acquiring
many kinds of
products and
services from
around the world
much more difficult
and expensive,
often impossible

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have
been relentless in publicizing the failures,
real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism – It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told,
given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized,
consumer-oriented world.
In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed
out how the numerous draconian sanctions
imposed by the United States since 1960
have produced many and varied scarcities
and sufferings and are largely responsible
for most of the problems pointed out by the
critics.
The critics, in turn, say that this is just an
excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for
every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States
would have to drop all sanctions and then
we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban
society to make up for lost time and recover
what it was deprived of, and demonstrate
what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on
earth.
In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the
United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life
during the first 39 years of this aggression.
The suit held Washington responsible for
the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten
years since, these figures have of course all
increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways
large and small, make acquiring many kinds
of products and services from around the
world much more difficult and expensive,
often impossible; frequently, they are things
indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring
money internationally has become a major
problem for the Cubans, with banks being
heavily punished by the United States for

60 TheReader | November 2009

dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean
that Americans and Cubans can’t attend
professional conferences in each other’s
country.
These examples are but a small sample
of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of
the Cuban people.
For years American political leaders and
media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear much of
that any more. Perhaps one reason is the
annual vote in the General Assembly on the
resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial
embargo imposed by the United States of
America against Cuba”. This is how the vote
has gone:
Year Votes
(Yes-No)
1992 59-2
1993 88-4
1994 101-2
1995 117-3
1996 138-3
1997 143-3
1998 157-2
1999 155-2
2000 167-3
2001 167-3
2002 167-3
2003 173-3
2004 179-3
2005 182-4
2006 183-4
2007 184-4
2008 185-3
2009 187-3

How it began, from State Department
documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisen-

Anti -Empire Report
hower administration decided “to adjust all
our actions in such a way as to accelerate
the development of an opposition in Cuba
which would bring about a change in the
Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to US interests.” 9
On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support
Castro … The only foreseeable means of
alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on
economic dissatisfaction and hardship. …
every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life
of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads
in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to
decrease monetary and real wages, to bring
about hunger, desperation and overthrow of
government.” 10 Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.
CT
Notes
1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language

“The majority of
Cubans support
Castro … The
only foreseeable
means of alienating
internal support
is through
disenchantment
and disaffection
based on economic
dissatisfaction
and hardship …
every possible
means should
be undertaken
promptly to
weaken the
economic life of
Cuba”

William Blum is the author of Killing
Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War 2; Rogue State: A Guide
to the World’s Only Superpower; WestBloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, and
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the
American Empire. His website is
www.killinghope.org

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